For an economic school history: the school desk as a vector of relations (São Paulo, 1874-1914)

Author(s)

Wiara Rosa Rios Alcântara

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2014-03-28

Examining board members

Diana Goncalves Vidal; Heloisa Maria Silveira Barbuy; Wilma Peres Costa; Hugo Massaki Segawa; Renata Duarte Simões

• Advisor: Diana Goncalves Vidal

Abstract

The study of school materiality, in this case, the school desk, shows how economic and administrative matters are related to the structure and the operation of the teaching institutions. For such a reason, this reasearch studies the school as a consumer market, the Government as a buyer and the school furniture industry emergences, in São Paulo, between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. As a methodology, the sources used were inventories of goods, crafts and correspondences from the officials and the teachers requiring school material (files produced inside the school); buyings and/or importation invoices, school furniture industries catalogues, almanacs, receipts from suplliers (linked to the market and to the school industry); manuals and pedagogical journals which approach the relation between the school desk and the studentss health, the hygienic, pedagogical, anthropometric and anatomical elements of the school furniture (documents made by some specialists); reports, list and warehouse books (documents from the public administration). The methodological choice consisted on selecting the school desk as the main object of study, following the tracks left in the school material culture, as a school and industrial artifact; in the economic history, as goods; in the connected history, as an object which rounds countries and culture. This situation showed that the industry had a significative contribution to the expansion and creation of the physical conditions of the elementary, modern and mass school. It also elucidates the economic and the administrative challenges of the State, as a provider of public work, in order to physically supply the school and allow the implementation of the school obligatoriness. As a result, it pointed that the school desks are vectors of pedagogical, hygienic, cultural and commercial relations. Therefore, besides a school objetc, it is an industrial artifact as well, showing that the school history and configuration are not only defined inside it, but in the relation with the external world, in economic, political and social issues. It implies that public politics and administrative practices directed to school in its formulation and introduction may not only take into account the institutional internal issues. The understanding and the interference in the school culture demand attention to the extra school relations as well. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 10/01881-2 - Right body, ordered space: the school wallet as pedagogic and hygienic device. (Sao Paulo, end of the century XIX and begin of the XX).
• Grantee: Wiara Rosa Rios Alcântara
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate