CIVILIZE AND INSTRUCTION IN THE GRADUATE SERIES NA ESCOLA E NO LAR

Abstract

The article discusses the civilizing pedagogical project in the graduated reading series At school and at home, authored by São Paulo professor Thomaz Galhardo. Published between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, we found, based on the scattered evidence of the editions located in the research, that the first book in the series was circulated until 1992 and the others until the 1960s, revealing a set of reading practices whose Popularity is explained by the emergence of a specific publishing market for the didactic genre and its adaptation to the structure of primary education. Following the criterion of continuity of content across lessons and themes, these manuals are based on a new conception of social life, which needed to be learned at school. Through its constituent elements, the objective of the text is to present the civilizing project model present in this series for the moral and intellectual formation of Brazilian childhood. Following the methodological paths of Cultural History, we chose the categories of practices and representations to discuss how social perceptions are not neutral discourses, on the contrary, they produce strategies and practices that tend to impose authority, in order to legitimize a reforming project. From the analysis of school editions, we demonstrated the way in which a civilizational model is constructed, thought about and transformed into a teaching object through textbooks.