O pensamento de Manoel Bomfim para a educação: uma crítica aos males de origem ao progresso da nação brasileira (1905-1931)

Abstract

Manoel Bomfim (1868-1932) was an intellectual who stood out on multiple fronts as a doctor, federal deputy, teacher at the Normal School, Director of the Pedagogium (1896-1919), member of the Liga Brasileira de Higiene Mental (1924) and Associação Brasileira de Educação (1924). He is the author of a written production of books, articles and typographic speeches about the formation of the Brazilian nation and the representation of its debate in the field of education. This research investigates his thinking directed to education and national identity, based on the counter-discourse produced in his writings from 1905 to 1931. The hypothesis of the thesis considers the autonomy and countercurrent criticism characterized by the questioning of hegemonic scientific discourses as the central argument in its written production and ideals of an independent nation through education. The estimated period corresponds to the publication of A América Latina: males de origem (1905) and Cultura e educação do povo brasileiro (1931), the author's last work. The documentary sources investigated in this work are typographed discourses, articles in newspapers, magazines and books that deal with the theme of education from the perspective of historical and training literature, reading, composition and pedagogical manuals. In addition to engagement, as an author/actor, we analyze its circulation in networks of relationships and sociabilities that, in a way, demonstrate the idea of in-between developed by Santiago (2019). It is considered that Bomfim's perspective is organized from the inversion of values of the Latin American discourse in relation to the European one. This path of reflection is demonstrated by a counter-discourse (FOUCAULT, 2007a) inaugurated in the work A América Latina: males de origem (1905), in which he justifies that Brazil's backwardness is not a matter of race, miscegenation and climatic condition, but of education. Manoel Bomfim argued that the "cure" for Brazilian "ills" would be by education and the idea of nation. The echoes of his reflections mobilized his circulation in different intellectual and political spaces from which he could observe the educational conceptions, the formative character of the teacher and the studies of experimental psychology, hygiene and child morals, in dialogue with the New Education conceptions (FREITAS, 2005). Finally, the study allows us to support the hypothesis that Bomfim established a critique of historiography in relation to national identity through the idea of the Brazilian tradition, the importance of education for the formation of the nation and progress.