A organização da instrução em Minas Gerais : o inspetor escolar enquanto agente do projeto racionalizador mineiro (1906 1938)

Abstract

This thesis sets out to investigate the strategies mobilized by the miners reformers to operate pedagogical changes under of the rationalization project in Minas Gerais, in the organization movement of public education between 1906 and 1938, through the analysis of education law, presidential messages, texts published in the Journal of Education, teacher meeting minutes, inspectors\' reports, as well as the study of a broad theoretical framework on the topic at hand. To understand how the school inspector turned into an agent of the proposition to rationalize and develop the state, from the process of organization of public instruction, we mapped the major educational reforms that occurred in this period, especially the reforms of João Pinheiro and Francisco Campos, seeking to highlight administrative and pedagogical changes, the reorganization of the technical inspection of the teaching service and the refocusing of the school inspector. We selected and studied, in the messages, information on administrative procedures linked to the republican ideals of spreading and establishing primary education in the state, appeals around the reduction of illiteracy and the formation of citizen concern about financial issues and aspects on the inspection of teaching and the work of the school inspector, in order to apprehend, from the official discourse, the underlying intentions. We related and analyzed various texts published in the Journal of Education about the formation of the inspector, after the reform of 1927 and also those texts produced by the school inspectors, to publicize and promote, among teachers, the use of the new pedagogical framework. In the reports of professionals and in the meeting minutes of teachers we sought to identify how the inspectors oversaw the physical, material and pedagogical conditions of schools and how teachers were guided and assessed. Based on the theoretical benchmark in the documentary data, we can say that, compared to the republican ideals of the constitution of a modern state, from the João Pinheiro reform, the technical inspection service gained centrality in education and was then structured in order to organize public instruction in Minas Gerais. At the same time, the school inspector stood as an instrument of control and supervision of the education and training of teachers, but the documents also showed their limits. In 1927, the Francisco Campos reform restructured the inspection service and the inspectors through a rigorous selection and training process, turning them into agents of the state, organizers of a new pedagogical proposal to impose, produce and reproduce that which was prescribed by law, in order to organize teaching and modernize the state. At the same time, the actions were marked by inconsistency between the defense of the values of a modern society in an agrarian, conservative and oligarchic environment and obstacles arising mainly from inadequate funding for education, requiring continuous changes and legal adjustments. Thus, the education inspection service, created in 1906, was abolished in 1938 and became an organ of minor importance.