A influência do positivismo de Augusto Comte na primeira lei orgânica do ensino brasileiro: a Reforma Capanema

Abstract

In this study, we aim at identifying and analyzing the influence of the Comte‘s positivism in the public policies for basic education in Brazil, during the ‗Estado Novo’ regime (from 1937 to 1945), when the first Education Organic Law was signed and sworn. Yet, it was when the high school, industrial education were structured and the commercial education was reformed and so, created the National Service of Industrial Learning - SENAI. This research is justified, once the establishment of conceptual parameters for the youth education from that time seem to implicate in an intentional division of Brazilians in two categories. One, of intellectuals who might conduct the future of the nation; and the other, of workers who might perform their historic role in the order. This constitutes the social aesthetics, so that, progress is established, what is a social dynamics that means, the progress done as the order bases. A bibliographic research was done with the main direction of analyzing the content produced concerning the subject and the political situation. With that, we establish a critical dialogue between the resources in a way to find relations of the positivism contributions that underlie the basic concepts of the ‗Reforma Capanema‘ and its implications to the current situation of the basic education in Brazil. Once the material studied had been summarized, we interpreted the postulates of Comte‘s thoughts related to his intended social reform with regard to the replacement of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Theology and its consequent metaphysics, by the positive theology and metaphysics, both part of the Courses of the Positive Philosophy and for the Positivist Catechism. We concluded that there was an undeniable influence of the positivist doctrine on the main historical and political happenings in Brazil, which results in social, political and cultural consequences ideologically diffused and legalized from education.