A organização do ensino primário nacional e a disseminação das escolas de primeiras letras na Cidade do Príncipe (1808-1889)

Abstract

The present paper analyzes the processes of scholar institutionalization and expansion of Escolas de Primeiras Letras in Brazil, province of Rio Grande do Norte and Cidade do Príncipe. The temporal clipping starts in 1808, with the arrival of the Royal Family in Brazil and their influences in brazilian‟s educational scenery, and ends in 1889, with the republic‟s establishment and closure of monarchist government. The primary unitary school was the model of scholar institution widespread in the imperial period, it was a formative environment to comply with elementary instruction, being conducted by a single teacher. This was the main characteristic of those whom worked in distinct spaces, most of times, inside teacher‟s own houses rooms in order to function. Such template expanded itself throughout the brazilian territory in both public and private realms, however with the main goal offering elementary instruction to the young and adult. The institutions grew numerically, both the destined to male public as well as those destined to the female, those however in a lesser scale, but with significant advances. In order to accomplish the paper, we started with the bibliographical and documental researches, in a source crossing perspective to analyze the object‟s complexity. Our main sources were the educational legislations, demographic data, provincial reports and inventory records,to assicatie the data collected, we used the source crossing procedure. Furthermore we used two papers of significant relevance to the educational historiography of Rio Grande do Norte, Nestor dos Santos Lima‟s book (1927) and the dissertation fo Marta Maria de Araújo (1979). The main authors who supported the study were: Almeida (1989), Saviani (2008), Trindade (2010), Cascudo (1984), Stamatto (2012), Macêdo (2015), Medeiros Neta (2011) and Magalhães (2004).The analysis pointed out that the Escolas de Primeiras Letras marked the process of educational institutionalization reasserting itself as a scholar unitary model with the units expansion in the majority of the national territory. Without going into the merits of education quality, it is concluded that these schools represented opportunities to the population to acquire the elementary knowledge through scholar spaces created with this goal.