Civilizar, higienizar, disciplinar: imagens republicanas na Escola de Aprendizes e Artífices da Cidade de Goiás (1909-1937)

Abstract

The research investigates the instituting images that cohere and legitimize professional education in Goiás in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the formation of the institutional imaginary of modernity in the public professional education. In it, the ideals of modernity interpret the past, plan the future and legitimize themselves in specific policies in the educational field. The institutional imaginary produces representations and practices marked by rationality and the disciplining of the bodies, has marks in the school building and are reinforced by institutional rites and images. The time frame of the research goes from the creation of the Escola de Aprendizes Artífices in the city of Goiás (1910), to the period of its transfer, during the change of the capital to Goiânia (1942). The doctoral thesis intends to deepen the research and focus on the Escola de Aprendizes e Artífices da Cidade de Goiás, an institution that, due to its singularities in terms of learning, harbored sociabilities that allow us to investigate the political disputes, the social base of the students and the educational projects in dispute in Goiás at the beginning of the 20th century. The period in focus (1910-1942) is of outstanding importance and significance to unveil the origins of professional education and its evolution in Brazil, based on public policies aimed at building the foundation of a modern labor society. The creation of the Apprenticeship School of Goiás and the ones in other states of the new Republic, took place at a time when there was an effort to overcome old representations about work, about childhood and youth. The purpose of the Republic in creating a school for the children of the “underprivileged of the estate” was ordered by a rationale and by the desire to build a labor intensive and disciplined citizenry. Thus the School of Apprentice Artisans used disciplinary training as a strategy to mold the ideal worker for the Republic. "Morally and materially abandoned," these students were categorized as vagrants, beggars, delinquents, and derelicts. The thesis works with the hypothesis that the instituting imaginary of the Republic articulated the principles of the “new” with the educational perspective, considering, under the motto of civilization, hygienism and disciplinarism, the apprentice and artisan schools as privileged spaces to train and professionalize the socially excluded