Associativismo pedagógico : a luz das “Ligas contra o analfabetismo” de Pernambuco e Sergipe (1916-1922)

Abstract

The leagues of Pernambuco and Sergipe against illiteracy comprise the subject of this doctoral thesis. Such leagues are civil organizations, founded between the years 1916 and 1922. Their main purpose was to spread primary education to guarantee the conditions which were necessary towards the consolidation of the republican national state. Based on two questions, analyzing the role played by such associations in Brazilian education is the main objective of the present research: a) Why are the leagues against illiteracy free societies if part of the historical literature states the unfeasibility of the development of modern and liberal culture in the First Republic of Brazil? b) In the context of free societies, what is the specificity of the leagues against illiteracy, once devoid of technical-pedagogical or scientific connotation according to what was preached by the “enthusiasm for education”? In order to problematize the object, the discovery of journalistic sources such as the printed "For the Country" and "New Crusade", the two official agencies under investigation, was of the uttermost importance. In addition, the notion of “voluntary associativism” proposed by Alexis de Tocqueville favored such a reflection, in relation to the civil association. Voluntary associativism became a theoretical tool to analyse the object, once it was related to the consensus established in the Brazilian educational historiography about the researched institutions, which would have been a mere bourgeois/military ideological tool and/or a simple expression of an "enthusiasm for education". Subjected to the relational procedures of the crossed history, such information resulted in valid intersections for the construction of the hypothesis that the experiences analyzed express the pedagogical associativism, typical of the liberal culture of the North region of Brazil at the time. The "Pedagogy of Light", category of the self-concept of the researched institutions and of the correlated purposes and means, favors the conclusion of this thesis, especially those relevant towards schooling. The Pedagogy of Light is the main connection of the propaganda speeches addressed in this text.