Teatros da modernidade: representações de cidade e escola primária no Rio de Janeiro e em Buenos Aires nos anos 1920

Abstract

The research was interested in the different representations of the primary teaching and of the city of Rio de Janeiro which were built according to the interlacing of the urban environment with the school ones during the 1920s. Based in the analysis of the periodical publications, educational legislation and actions of reform in the old capital of Brazil and in the capital of Argentina, this study problematizes the educational and urban dimensions of the government. The acceleration of time and the urban growth in the two first decades brought the necessity of articulating different initiatives that rationalized the architectural design and organized the manners and popular traditions. It was according to these characteristics during that period that the interlacing of the science of urbanism with the knowledge and practices of the primary schooling occurred. In this table, under the government logic, School and City began to be designed in the view of a common repertoire of strategies. This was explained because they longed to convert the City in an educational space and the School in a device to transfuse urban and public hygiene ideals. With the objective of realizing the conversion of the City and the School an effective invasion of the city circumstances occurred in the school time and spaces and the impregnation of those over the city. It was projected to the primary education the task of explaining the urban transformations in a way that they were accepted and became valued. In the same way, it was invested in the educational dimension which the organization and harmonization of the urban carioca landscape should interpret. These concerns concurred to the different strategies that were mobilized by the City Hall and the Diretoria Geral de Instrução Pública that aimed the teaching of correct ways for the population to practice the city. Among these, because they systematized a lot of what they intended to disseminate, a great attention was spent in educational shows played by the children. The benefits of those events didn t end in the staging. Before anything else, the backstage moments , in the same way, were characterized as opportunities which invited the population to visualize, reflect and weave comments on the ideals of harmony, hygiene and disciplining which boosted the making of these events which invaded the city with a growing frequency. The relevance gained by these educational spectacles in the carioca ground instigated me to think in a possible circulation of this modality of engraining habits and behaviors among children and adults in a South American context, considering the educational uneasiness of the primary teaching associated to the movement of urban improvement between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. So this concern was appointed as a key of entrance to sew up some possible approximations and detachments between the educational shows in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and of Buenos Aires. The path followed by this study made possible to point, in the carioca case, to a resizing in the modernity conception in the course of the analyzed period. If, until the 1920s, the focus had been in the public works of modernization , now it moved to the necessity of the rationalization of the city and to the inculcation of modernity attitudes in the population. In the portenho case, from the end of the nineteenth century on, the projects of public intervention had been based in the grilla and in the park , which meant an effort to think a global planning for the capital. The turn to the 1920 s decade was marked by the necessity to prepare a new Plano Regulador that contained the suburb advancements and lessen the incoherence originated in the intense flow of vehicles and pedestrians. With the perspective of inculcating modernity attitudes and the intention to restrain the suburbs advances and harmonize the flow of automotives and pedestrians the attentions, in the two cities, were turned over to the primary education. In the experiences studied the interventions in the city and at school had been interpreted as a condition that aroused, demanded and evaluated that group of behaviors planned as indispensable to the multiplication of conducts and suitable habits to the modernity desired.