A educação na gênese do Estado-nação brasileiro (1750-1889)

Abstract

This research deals with the process of institutionalization of school education in Brazil during the construction of the new constitutional order that emerged from the crisis and disintegration of the Portuguese Empire in America. The work relates the formulation of educational policy measures in the first decades of the new country to the formation of the modern Nation-State, investigating the meanings that school education will assume in the society projects of the dominant classes for the whole social body involved in the new pact represented by idea of belonging to the Brazilian nation, developing the thesis that school education played a relevant role in this process. The documental corpus, constructed through documents issued by the government in the implementation of the nascent educational policy, known as State acts, and through the selection of specialized bibliography on the subject, were analyzed through a qualitative approach, guided by the principles of the paradigm epistemology of historical-dialectical materialism in the perspective updated by Gramsci. In short, it can be said that the political-institutional arrangement built over the analyzed period resulted in a federative-type pact through the consolidation of the representative constitutional monarchy, in which the influential social strata of each region represented their provinces within the scope of regional while participating in the elaboration of policies at the national level. The national project revealed by the analysis of the educational policy of the time, oscillating with each major change that occurred in the general government, indicates the intention of promoting the adaptations of the young country to the new scenario of development of the world economy in its industrial phase, a condition for the entry of the empire in the ranks of modern civilized nations. A level of schooling was provided for each social layer, with the expansion of primary education to the popular layers of citizens and the exclusion of a significant portion of the population inhabiting the national territory, considered alien to the social pact of the Brazilian nation, such as the indigenous nations and enslaved populations of African origin. In this process, the ideology of the dominant classes, as a conception of the world that guides praxis, in its oscillating movement to exercise hegemony over the entire social body and fixate on social practices with the aim of dissimulating its inherent contradictions, ensuring it cohesion, was supported by both civil society institutions and those originating from public authorities, and school education in development was a relevant mediator for the dissemination of the new order synthesized by the idea of Brazilian nationality.