La Genese du concept d'éducation publique au Portugal et au Brésil

• Published in: Paedagogica historica Vol. 47; no. 1-2; pp. 49 - 63
• Main Authors: Campos Mendonça, Ana Waleska Pollo, Chaves Vasconcelos, Maria Celi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 01.02.2011; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Brésil; Conflict; Education history; Education reform; Educational Change; Educational History; et XIX; Historians; Individualized Instruction; Pedagogy; Popular Education; Portugal; Public Education; Public schools; siècles; State Policy; XVIII; ème; éducation publique; Brazil; Portugal
• DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2010.530283
• ISSN: 0030-9230

The study is concerned with how the public education concept has been appropriated by several academic works in the field of history of education. In fact, they seem to use this concept in an anachronic way, without any real concern about its historicity. Thus, the study dialogues with the historian Reinhart Koselleck, in order to develop reflections on the historicity of the public education concept. From such a standpoint, it postulates assumptions that the concept has a history; it is articulated to a specific context that makes it comprehensible. Hence, the temporal variation of the concept is assumed as a historical event with a unique character articulated to its timing. Given this assumption, the study analyses two moments/dimensions of the genesis of the modern concept of public education in the Luso-Brazilian world. The first moment relates to the Marques de Pombal Reform of Education (Estudos Menores) in Portugal, in the eighteenth century. This educational reform expressed one of the first attempts at public education "statisation" in Europe. It stresses the character of this policy, to be understood in the context of Illustrated Despotism in Portugal. Indeed such an intervention basically expresses the State's concern in controlling the formation of mentalities, mostly among the intellectual aristocracy. Hence, public education was aimed at the social strata that would support State policy to establish its centralisation project. From this perspective, it is not possible to identify public education with popular education. The second moment/dimension relates to Brazil in the nineteenth century, in the context of the constitution and consolidation of the Imperial State, which foresees the chance to straighten the State power, a pathway towards the fulfilment of its purposes. In such a context, the education and the legitimacy of its institutionalisation reflect the struggle between the local power (a Casa) and its resistance to Imperial State interference and domination. This theoretical and practical confrontation, occurring in the specific context of conflict between domestic education and public education, represents a twofold level of particular interest. At a first analytical level, the concept of public education springs from the opposition/differentiation established between the public ambit and the private one; hence, from such a perspective, public education is primordially that realised outside the domestic ambit. This antagonism is mostly expressed by the tension among the terms of public education/instruction that pervades pedagogical debate at that time. It also refers to the resistance showed by the leading elites towards the growing interference of public power, mostly the State, in the private ambit that had been, until then, under its own jurisdiction: to decide on, to contract out and to account for in relation to their children's education. At a second analytical level, without any doubt, such a conflict is related to the universalisation process of the school model being consolidated in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century.