Escola Normal Municipal Noturna: sua história nas impressões e percepções de uma egressa (Ituiutaba, MG, 1964–74)

Abstract

F rom the mid-1930s until the late 1960s, teacher training (ensino Normal) in Ituiutaba, MG, was provided by private schools. Consequently, for over thirty years, this educational path was reserved for the economic elite. Due to a lack of competition, these schools met the demand for primary teachers within the municipality and for their own needs. At a 1961 regional congressmen meeting in the Triângulo Mineiro region, Ituiutaba’s proposed creating a public, night-shift normal school. However, the 1964 civil-military coup radically altered these plans, delaying the school’s establishment until late 1968. Thus, this study examines the genesis of such school, which was called Colégio Normal Municipal Noturno based on the following thesis: the school emerged due to popular pressure to serve the working class. This argument encompasses the school’s creation, installation, and operation, as well as powers and struggles, agents and targets, means and ends involved. The understanding of this subject is grounded in the impressions and perceptions (memoirs) of a former female student from the first class (internal perspective) and the systematization of various documentary sources (external view). Research questions focus on background and conditions of creation; agents, interests, motivations, and demands; educational and pedagogical ideologies and orientations. Its aims were the following: to have a historical understanding of the school’s genesis; to identify agents and motivations behind its creation; to recognize the underlying pedagogical ideology; to characterize the institution based on its physical location and practices; to outline student profile (socio-economic conditions and interests); and to reveal the potential of the student voice as a historical source. Conducted within the “history and historiography of education” research line in the Postgraduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia, the study was developed as a documentary and (partially) empirical investigation centered on the field of the history of educational institutions, specifically the school culture. The methodology combined discourse analysis, cultural history, oral history and (auto)biographical method to gather general sources and to produce memorial sources. They include newspapers stories, laws, student manuscripts, photographs, statistics, and a written autobiographical memoir. The timeframe spans from 1964 to 1974. Results endorse previous findings regarding the school’s origins, but provide deeper detail on the remote origins of the idea for free, night-shift teacher training and the obstacles to its achievement. While the need to serve the working class amid social ferment was clear, the school also attracted other student profiles. The former student abovementioned is an example: at the time, she was a middle-class housewife and mother of three. Through her student work, she helped filling gaps in the newly structured school, which lacked practical training activities. Alongside colleagues, she created a student newspaper that helped secure material resources, such as a telephone, for an institution that initially operated under precarious conditions. Although the school was created to meet working-class education needs, those very deficiencies persisted within the school, for it was up to students to resist and drive their own self-education.