THE PUBLIC INSTRUCTION REFORMERS FROM MINAS GERAIS IN THE BEGINNING OF THE REPUBLIC

Abstract

This article proposes to discuss, in a general manner, questions around the theme of educational policies, during the first decades of the Republic. Specifically, the main goal is to recognize the reformers of public instruction in Minas Gerais that acted during the period of 1881 and 1910. For that, we use as sources the messages sent from the president to the Legislative Congress, the annals of the Chambers of Deputies and Senate, the laws and decrees, from the period. Through these documents, we structured a prosopographic study that allowed us to have a collective knowledge of a group of individuals that were given power to reform the public instruction. In this study, we have privileged categories that helped us knowing the origins of the reformers and their formation and professional trajectories, for example: family relations, place of birth, generational related aspects, scholar trajectories and professionalization. It’s an approach located on the field of social-political history, around the place and action of the political, as in, the comprehension of the existence of social vectors that coincide with the production of a political culture. The analysis allowed us to see the eclosion of the formation of a republican political community of Minas Gerais, constituted of individuals called reformers that, upon the process of formation throughout the historical trajectories, would come to utilize the rhetorical tools specific to the construction of arguments in favor of the measures and projects of reforming the instruction and, there on, the society.