As reformas educacionais de Benjamim Constant (1890- 1891) e Francisco Campos (1930-1932) : o projeto educacional das elites republicanas
Abstract
The study objects of this work are two educational reforms derived from the Public Federal
Administration, namely the Reforms by Benjamim Constant (1890-1891) and Francisco
Campos (1930-1932). Both are characterized by a series of decrees that legislated on
several aspects of education and its degrees. The former was limited to regulating
education in the Federal Capital (Rio de Janeiro), with the exception of high education,
which was regulated nationwide. The later regulated the national education, thus
representing a landmark in this sense.
The Reform by Benjamim Constant was a product of the Proclamation of the Republic;
and the one by Francisco Campos was the expanding of the conflagration of 1930. These
two moments in the Brazilian political-economic context are the portrait of the same
process: the bourgeois revolution in Brazil, which had not been finished in 1930, but,
rather, had been provided with new impulses. The revolution that took place in Brazil did
not follow the classical ways , which characterized, for example, the French Jacobinism.
The process acclimated to Brazil was singular, but its analysis suggests similarities that are
evidenced in the terms created by Lenin and Gramsci Prussian way and passive
revolution, respectively. These two categories, which can be used as interpretative criteria
for the Brazilian bourgeois revolution, develop the idea of conservative modernization,
composed of modern and renewed elements that cause no revolutionary disruptions. While
modernization is prompted by a segment of the conservative dominant class, revealing the
reaction against the possibility of an effective transformation, it also absorbs part of the
popular demand. In Brazil, the bourgeois spirit emerged from the agrarian aristocracy,
which was responsible for the Modern State and contributed towards the capitalist
development. In summary, the educational reforms resulting from this bourgeois context
in Brazil, which were implemented by those conservative elites, reflected the educational
thoughts by such elites. The primary education, essentially considered as the education for
the people, was limited to Rio de Janeiro in the Reform by Benjamim Constant and not
even mentioned in the Reform by Francisco Campos. Therefore, the education project of
the republican elites included no expansion of the primary education, long retarding the
establishment of both a public school, open to the subaltern classes, and a National
Education System.