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More than strengthening, an adventure of the body: the summer camps in South America (1882-1950)

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Author(s):
André Dalben
Total Authors: 1
Document type: Doctoral Thesis
Press: Campinas, SP.
Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Educação
Defense date:
Examining board members:
Carmen Lúcia Soares; Janes Jorge; Vinicius Demarchi Silva Terra; Agueda Bernardete Bittencourt; André Luiz Paulilo
Advisor: Carmen Lúcia Soares
Abstract

The summer camps (vacation colonies) had the most theoretical support in ancient knowledge derived from the medicine which prioritized the outdoor life, far from the urban centers, for recovery and strengthening the body. By offering healthy food and bodily practices performed within the nature for the children of the working classes during their vacation, the summer camps had initially as their main objective the prevention of the spread of diseases, especially tuberculosis, which contagiated many residents of large cities. The summer camps were published in the international scientific community since 1882 through conferences and were often recommended as an innovative measure of children care that many countries could adopt to protect their children's health. Taking as the main sources for the research the annals of International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, the Pan American Child Congress and also magazines specialized in health, education and physical education, many of them published by official departments, the propose of this research is to investigate the policies to implement the summer camps for children in the four largest urban centers of South America at the first decades of the twentieth century: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The time bias is defined from 1882, when the summer camps began to be debated in the international arena, until the mid-1950s, when the first allopathic medice to treat the tuberculosis began to be used more effectively to control the disease, changing the public health policy in many countries, which would not take the resources to maintain the outdoor life to preserve the health of their populations, and unseating the summer camps of their major medical goal. The research sought to expand the studies conducted by the History of Education and the History of Physical Education, since the summer camps are object of study unexplored by the South American science, even though they narrate the innovative hitorical perspective when they are established as an institution concurrently next and distinct from school, creating and implementing new practices and educational models and pedagical contents, when more traditional pedagogies previously excluded found the opportunity to be incorporated as an educational opportunity. Adopting the cultural history as the theoretical framework for the analysis of the sources this research focus on the changing of the mentalities and sensibilities that shifted the outdoor life from the medical precepts to conceive it as an education body capable of being systematized and institutionalized by the summer camps. During the period covered by the survey, it concludes that the summer camps were not limited only as a public health measure, once they staged a series of educational procedures that would definitely transform the school holidays in an adventure of the body that allowed many children's wishes come true and that marked new educational opportunities geared especially to children who had not hitherto their rights to health , education and play fully respected (AU)