Entre o soar do sino e as transações comerciais: as escolas primárias da Freguesia Urbana da Candelária (Capital Brasileira, 1870-1889)

Abstract

The 1870s and 1880s decades of the Brazilian Empire are characterized by major structural interventions, with urban changes and also debates about important issues such as the abolition of the slave system and the education of the people. This is considered the main way for the formation of modern and civilized man. The set of such actions seek to equalize Brazil to the so-called modern countries. And, in this case, great importance was given to the process of schooling, which, despite of that, in the capital of the Empire, occurred in an unequal way. Researches have explored increasingly precise geographic cutouts in order to understand the heterogeneity of this schooling process. This dissertation is part of this movement and addresses a region of the Imperial Court not very privileged in historical studies: the Urban Parish of Candelaria. The general objective of this work is to understand, in this locality, the way it has been organized and the characteristics of public and private schools, which also consists in evaluating the involvement of the diverse subjects and political forces. Specifically, it attempts to locate, analyze, and reflect about the actions of the imperial government to establish primary public education in the parish of Candelária, also considering the activities of the private initiative to attend the educational demand. To make this investigation possible, we resort to bibliographic study and documentary research. The main sources are the Minister of Business of the Empire reports; documents under the guard of the Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, the Education Series of the Arquivo Nacional and records in the private archive of the Irmandade do Santíssimo Sacramento da Candelária. We also consulted the periodical A Escola: Revista Brasileira de Educação e Ensino (1877-1878), the periodical Almanak Laemmert (1844-1889), the newspaper O Apostolo (1866-1901), the newspaper Diário de Notícias (1885-1895) and the Brazilian Census of 1872. We have supported ourselves theoretically and methodologically in authors who approach the constitution of the city of Rio de Janeiro (Noronha Santos, 1965,1981); in the historiography of education, especially in research about the schooling of the Empire (Gondra, Schueler, 2008 and Limeira, 2007) and papers about on Catholic Sisterhood (Boschi, 1986). As a result, we found an Urban Parish with a characteristic and commercial importance, educational demand met mostly by the two elementary schools maintained by the government and private actions as a trade in education.