Reading books and historical knowledge: education of the senses in Campinas (1890-1920)

• Grant number: 17/00905-4
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: July 01, 2017
• End date: June 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education
• Principal Investigator: Arnaldo Pinto Junior
• Grantee: Arnaldo Pinto Junior
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In the history of the school education, text books played a key role in the process of consolidation and legitimacy of the contents studied in classroom. These school works also collaborated to the construction of certain teaching and learning practices. The enlargement of the Brazilian school universe, intensified from the middle of the 19th Century and, mainly, from the implementation of the republican regime, was designed by sociocultural speeches which defended most of the time the importance of formal education and its potential to the progress of the nation. The consequences of this process generated the valuation of certain world views, institutions, and subjects, along with learning material considered more suitable to the ethical, moral and aesthetic formation of the new generations. Among the different types of textbooks made in the mentioned period, we focus in this research the reading books intended for the primary education. In the presence of the gradual increase of the school universe, the diversity of publications reveals distinct pedagogical prospects and social demands. The selection and treatment of the historical knowledge in the reading books demonstrate the continuous enhancement of facts, characters and visions of the past. This investigation searches to ponder about the specificities of the historic representations published on the pages of the studied works, searching for their articulations with the modernizer speeches, the education of the senses and sensitivities. In this way, the analysis of reading books adopted at primary schools in the city of Campinas in the first decades of the Republic (1890-1920), a period characterized by meaningful changes both in this town and in several regions of the country, intends to problematize the relations established between historical knowledge, education of the senses and sociocultural projects of the modernity. (AU)