Teacher education history in São Paulo (1875-1894): intersections between teacher and school ideals.

Author(s)

Tatiane Tanaka Perez

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-11-14

Examining board members

Carlota Josefina Malta Cardozo dos Reis Boto; Maria Helena Camara Bastos; Vivian Batista da Silva

• Advisor: Carlota Josefina Malta Cardozo dos Reis Boto

Abstract

This essay intends to analyze the construction of a school culture assessed from the pedagogical knowledge in course in the Escola Normal de São Paulo, at the end of the 19th century. It assumes the premise that the knowledge thought of as necessary for the teaching profession are revealing of a professional teaching culture and of representations of ideal teachers and schools that one intends to form. Such knowledge can be identified in printed formation manuals offered to candidates to the magisterium and its appropriations made by these candidates, read through their discourses in exams at the Escola Normal. The period of time delimited for this study comprehends two decades, from 1875 to 1894. The year of 1875 corresponds to the second opening of the Escola Normal moment in which, for the first time, written exams were taken in this school, offered to its students and to the candidates for public primary teaching. The year of 1894 marks the beginning of many changes in the structure and organization of the school, besides the reallocation of the Escola Normal to its own building. We seek here to demonstrate the relationship between the expansion of primary instruction and the initiatives in teacher education in particular institutions, above all in the Province of São Paulo in the last quarter of the 19th century. From the analysis of the exams and pedagogical manuals, we try to identify certain conceptions of education, instruction, schools and teaching methods that were then circulating, as we understand that such aspects are essential to the understanding of the teachers profile and of a model of school that was then intended. At last, we intend to bring to the surface an ideal of teacher in that times ideology. In the period under scrutiny, the teacher has a central and exemplary role in the formation of desirable habits and conducts for the population. From the moment that the State assumes the responsibility for the instruction of its people, it institutes a more rigorous control over the educational process and, consequently, over the teacher. Turning him into a public employee under the tutorship of the State, it becomes possible to create control mechanisms that are more rigorous concerning the selection process for the teaching personnel, the authorized institutions for its formation, and the establishment of a group of requisite knowledge for the profession. In this process of professional constitution, it is possible to notice changing and permanent factors, articulated to a civilizational project through the dissemination of habits, conducts and practices, typically the scholar ones that orient and permeate society as a whole. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 10/02932-0 - Teacher education history in São Paulo (1875-1894): intersections between teacher and school ideals
• Grantee: Tatiane Tanaka Perez
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master