Em terras alheias: a viagem de João Ribeiro à Alemanha como estratégia de legitimação na educação (1895-1897)

Abstract

Interpreting the ways in which João Batista Ribeiro de Andrade Fernandes (1860, SE – 1934, RJ) gave visibility to his commissioned trip to Germany as a strategy of legitimacy in the education is the objective of the present investigation. In the newly proclaimed Republic, the professor left for Berlin, to study the characteristics of German public education, also visiting other cities, as well as France, England and Italy, staying in distant lands from 1895 to 1897. Divided into four chapters, in First, I investigated the cultural capital of the traveler, from the perspective of Bourdieu (2017), which implies considering his work in the press and his teaching experience prior to the trip – his participation in the competition for Director of Public Instruction of Minas Gerais and his entry into the National Gymnasium, both in 1890 –, trying to think about how the teacher conceived education and the schooling process before his departure. In the second chapter, I approached the trip from the analysis of his impressions of the crossing entitled “Da Allemanha”, published in the periodical O Commercio de São Paulo. I had to cross these sources with the personal letters exchanged with some subjects who made up their sociability network, in the conception of Sirinelli (2013), as well as with the publication of a recent scientific-literary magazine, O Novo Mundo, which would have the direction of the writing by this traveler. The third chapter went into the period in which he was appointed as the representative of Brazil in charge of participating in the London International Conference, producing a handwritten and alphabetical bibliography of German periodicals on our country, entitled “German Publications on Brazil (1890–1890- 1898)”. Certainly, this was a strategy adopted by the traveler to remain on European soil, which he had only achieved due to his extensive sociability network. I end with the fourth chapter, in which I set out to reflect on the unfolding of João Ribeiro's trip, that is, how he used it to enter the Academia Brasileira de Letras, one year after his return to Brazil. I compared his bibliographic production, intersecting with the records produced during his crossing and with the report published by Said Ali, a German professor at the same high school that João Ribeiro taught, who was also on commission in Berlin at the same time as the traveling professor. I reflected, then, on how the first trip was essential to retrace old and new travel routes to Europe and how historiography considers that this traveler has benefited from this first trip to review the writing of history. With this, the present investigation intended to broaden the understanding of the circulation of German scientific knowledge in Brazil from the trip of this Brazilian professor, since the historiography of education has privileged the Swiss, Belgian, French, North American and Portuguese brands in Brazilian education.