| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to understand the construction of the importance of school attendance in the
organization of primary public school (Minas Gerais, Brazil) in the context of the first
republican decades. We seek to verify how the policies to encourage school attendance were
being built during the surveyed period and how do they related to the construction of the
republican school. We seek to identify the actions undertaken by the Legislative and
Executive powers regarding to the maintenance of students in schools. It is plausible to reflect
on school attendance as a matter of political scope, because we understand the public school
as a vector that is part of the construction of the state itself in the first decades of the
republican regime in Minas Gerais. In the course of the investigation, we noticed that the
meanings attributed to school attendance were being constructed in the investigated period.
The starting point is in the year of 1892, in which the first republican law of instruction of
Minas Gerais was promulgated, the Law No. 41. The endpoint is 1911, when there was the
education reform governed by Decree No. 3191. We consider that the fact that the educational
legislation of 1911 makes the school fund compulsory is an arrival point where school
attendance has came to be seen by the State as an issue that should undergo a kind of
intervention that goes beyond the pedagogical, structural and administrative offer of the
school. We seek to understand the process that culminated in a specific regulation for
increasing school attendance. We used two main documental corpora in this research: the first
comes from the public administration from which we selected reports from the Interior
Secretarial and messages from State Presidents. The second is legislation that can be
considered as an instrument of society organization. We analyzed the Federal Constitution of
1891, the Minas Gerais Constitution of 1892, the primary education reforms edited between
1892 and 1911, namely, Law No. 41 regulated by Decree No. 655 of October 17, 1893; Law
No. 281 of 1899, regulated by Decree No. 1.348 in January of 1900; Law No. 439 of 1906,
regulated by Decree No. 1.960 in 1906 and Law No. 533 of 1910 regulated by Decree No.
3.191 of June 9, 1911, as well as the Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly and News from
the Minas Gerais Newspaper that dealt with the frequency and the school fund. The
educational reforms undertaken in Minas Gerais, the decrees that organize the laws, as well as
the debates held by legislators in this context, give us clues about the school social function
and about the importance of strategies creation to increase school attendance. With this thesis,
therefore, we try to demonstrate the process in which attendance was becoming a central
element in schooling policies in Minas Gerais in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth
century’s, more specifically, in the advent of the Republic in Brazil. | |
