A educação escolar primária pública e gratuita no Estado Federativo do Rio Grande do Norte (1889-1904)

Abstract

In Brazil, the federative and representative republic, politically and legally established in the Constitution of the United States of Brazil (1891), left to Brazilian states and municipalities the power to regulate and promote free public elementary school education for boys and girls, subject recipients of civil and social right to study and to learn. The master's dissertation work, in the rigor of historical and documentary research (Constitution of the United States of Brazil [1891], Constitutions of the State of Rio Grande do Norte [1891, 1892, 1898], national and State educational legislation, reports of the Board of Public Instruction and Government messages), in accordance with the theme of public and free elementary school education and public policies of federative State and, to the object of study – free public elementary school education and federative regime in Brazil and Rio Grande do Norte, in its historical events and its target subjects of the civil and social right to study and to learn in the period from 1889 to 1904 – led us to define, as an objective, the historical reflection about the institutionalization of elementary school education through cumulative competences by the State and municipalities of Rio Grande do Norte, in accordance with the constitutional precepts, republican, federative, representative and political-pedagogical. This work is methodologically oriented by theorizing of Rousseau, Kant, Amaro Cavalcanti and Cury – especially as regards the legal and political foundations, in addition to the public policy of a National Republican State (with their respective municipalities), federal, secular, of an independent nation. In this period (1889-1904), the school education that was instituted for the infancy through constitutions, regulations and educational laws, was based on political, juridical and conceptual ideas of the representatives of the Executive power for the Republican regime, federative, representative and liberal regime. Somehow, these ideas were based on theorizing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Amaro Cavalcanti on the Republican State, federative, representative, in a copartnership State ruled by public laws and formed by citizens with rights and duties that are part of a national collectivity.