"Rogo que concedaes assim a vontade dos menores a um serviço a pátria": alistamento e formação de marujos na Escola de Aprendizes Marinheiros da Paraíba (1885-1915)

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the process of enlisting and training sailors at the Escola de Aprendizes Marinheiros da Paraíba between 1885 and 1915. With the proposal to collect and professionalize the children of the poor, this unit proposed adopting a style of education that attributed work as the best way of preventing delinquency. However, in order to fill the vacancies in these places, candidates had to undergo a battery of examinations, the thoroughness of which sought to differentiate between those bodies that were robust enough for life at sea and those that were not. The tests were also a foretaste of what was to follow, since once enrolled, they would be subject to an environment of constant surveillance, well-defined rules and activities, as well as being intolerant of any kind of insubordination. For a better understanding of the subject, I dialogued with the categories of discipline formulated by the philosopher Michel Foucault (2018), interculturality, proposed by Vera Maria Candau (2008), everyday life, defended by Michel de Certeau (1996), as well as educational culture, by Antônio Carlos Ferreira Pinheiro (2009). These concepts are useful for problematizing the sources, which were methodologically analysed using discourse analysis, as proposed by Michel Foucault (2014), namely: the Regulations for the Seamen's Apprentice Schools (1855, 1885, 1907 and 1915), the Aid Books (1896-1900), the Office Copier Books (1895-1914), as well as editions of the Paraíba newspapers A União (1897-1898) and O Norte (1909-1914). The conclusion is that the Escola de Aprendizes Marinheiros da Paraíba, during the period under investigation, served a purpose of training children's bodies. To this end, the dimensions of enlistment and training were mobilized as disciplinary tools in order to ensure that control was experienced as early as possible by the apprentices, that is, from the moment they were admitted until they were sent to the shipyards.