Viagem como missão: intercâmbio pedagógico do educador Nestor dos Santos Lima (1913-1923)

Abstract

Analyzing the pedagogical trip of Nestor dos Santos Lima is the objective of this work. Officially commissioned as a representative of Rio Grande do Norte, in 1923 he launched himself to know the teaching in the most developed centers of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The displacement made it possible for the educator to observe and write about the principles and methods of the practices developed in normal, professional and primary educational institutions. The knowledge acquired was organized in his report, which expresses the relations established, their impressions and recommendations for the norte-rio-grandense education. While chosen for this mission, he is legitimized in the intellectual environment whereas his networks, political relations and knowledge are expanded, which gives him the passport to occupy new spaces. When he returned to the state, he created and occupied the direction of the Department of Education, where he became responsible for the production of regiments and reports that would reorganize the state education, through activities such as school inspection. For this research, I use as a main source the trip report Da Organização do Ensino Normal, Profissional e Primário no sul do Brasil e no Rio da Prata (1923) in dialogue with other documents of the period, such as the newspaper A República (1923) and the magazine Pedagogium (1923), located in the collection of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Rio Grande do Norte/IHGRN. Not only the trip report, but also books, booklets and other didactic material accompanied the traveler on his return. The analysis of the route made by Nestor Lima and his contributions enables me to access, through his writing, the multiple factors that made him a traveling teacher, as well as the institutions he has visited. A man that leaves traces of himself in what he proposed to produce, he represents the educational reality of the early years of the twentieth century, among the practices and progresses aimed for the teaching, in a context of social modernization and formation of the republican citizen in Rio Grande do Norte