The ethos of the selective school in historical perspective (1930-1960)

• Grant number: 17/06164-6
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2017
• End date: May 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: Regina Cândida Ellero Gualtieri
• Grantee: Regina Cândida Ellero Gualtieri
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• City of the host institution: Guarulhos
• Associated researchers: Renata Marcílio Cândido

Abstract

Among the chronic problems of Brazilian education is the inability of the school system to guarantee for many children and young people expected domain of knowledge at each schooling stage nor even the permanence in the educational process. This fact is made evident by the historical high rates of retention and dropout as well as by student poor performances along the last decades. Attempts to justify school failure - understood as the set of situations in which the student does not correspond to that performance expected by the school - have been elaborated and diffused in the educational environment which contribute to constitute an ethos (Geertz, 2013). This project intends to investigate, in historical perspective, the construction and permanence of a pedagogical ethos that attributes to the child the responsibility for his learning difficulties due to his organic, psychological, familiar or social condition and considers smallest participation of the school and the system itself in this responsibility. With this aim, the project's purpose is to analyze publications related to schools and teacher trainings between the 1930s and 1960s. In this period, theories with different approaches (biological, psychological, psychoanalytical and sociological) try to justify school failure and in that sense, they helped to consolidate the mentioned ethos. The source of this research will be the "Revista de Educação", initially entitled "Education", published, in the State of São Paulo, since the late 1920s until 1961 with some interruptions and new changes of its name. (AU)