Democratic Education(s) in Early 20th Century Brazil: Making Up Citizens Through the Teaching of Social Sciences

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Abstract

We sought to explore what kinds of students the Social Studies subject intended to train in Brazilian democracy during the early 1930s and up until the 1960s. We organized a grid of intelligibility through which to frame the school subject Social Studies during that time, connecting three notions: about how Pedagogy assembled its objects and subjects; about how the views of the Escola Nova movement believed on an inexorable nature of Modernity; and about Cosmopolitanism as the embodiment of radical cultural theses about ways of living. Using this grid, we analyzed the textbook ‘Methodological Introduction to Social Studies’ from 1957, to understand the guidelines of Social Studies in Brazil, and how students were affected by them.

Authors

• Gabriel Brasil de Carvalho Pedro, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

• Marcia Serra Ferreira, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro