Grupos escolares municipais de Caxias do Sul (1943-1951): espaço, tempo e culturas escolares

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the history of the Municipal School Groups of Caxias do Sul, observing how the process of opening and organizing these spaces in rural areas occurred, narrating aspects of the school cultures produced in these educational institutions. The time frame adopted begins in 1943, with the inauguration of the seven educational institutions covered in the research under the prerogative of the National Education Crusade, and ends in 1951, with Municipal Decree No. 99, which established the guidelines for education in the municipality, resulting in a process of urbanization of municipal school groups. The theoretical contribution is based on Cultural History, from the perspective of School Cultures and the History of School Institutions. Methodologically, this research is supported by historical documentary analysis, using as sources documents produced for school groups (laws, decrees, acts, Botetins do CPOE, Revista do Ensino, Jornal Despertar, Programas Escolares), about school groups (newspapers and periodicals, photographic albums and individual photographs) and by school groups (minutes of final exams, attendance record books, teaching staff records, transcripts of teacher interviews, among others). As categories of analysis, priority was given to investigating school knowledge, materialized in the School Program; of the subjects, in particular the teachers; the practices and rites involved in the celebrations and programming of Semana da Pátria and Hora Cívica; gymnastics, games and dramatizations that have become consolidated as components of pedagogical practices; the school's auxiliary institutions; of materialities and school space, which acquired distinct functions in the constitution of a shared school material culture. The municipal school groups, created from the National Education Crusade, played a significant role in promoting nationalist practices, emerging as important spaces for the dissemination of values, symbols and the national language in areas of colonial area, contributing to the construction of a national identity that was incorporated with aspects of rural daily life. In this sense, the elevation of isolated schools to the category of municipal school groups was a strategy to insert surveillance and control devices in rural communities influenced by Italian immigration and, despite representing the process of internalization of school groups in the rural area of the municipality, municipal school groups remained between the reality of state school groups and isolated schools. Therefore, the thesis I defend is that municipal school groups were schooling alternatives that, despite aspiring to the ideals of serial schools, still had many similarities with isolated schools, sharing rurality as a characteristic that influenced subjects, practices, representations, materialities and times, shaping everyday life and school cultures. The municipal school groups acquired a function not only of educating subjects, disciplining their bodies and emotions, but also of valuing the work of rural people, proposing more technical and scientific knowledge to strengthen the importance of agricultural activities for the municipality. In this sense, highlight the action of rural communities to maintain these spaces and to support the schooling and teaching process. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]