Performance and adaptation of poor children to school: the research pattern of CRPE-SP

Abstract

This article examines how Centro Regional de Pesquisas Educacionais de São Paulo (CRPE-SP – Sao Paulo Regional Center for Educational Research) addressed the issues of performance and adaptation of poor children to school. It focuses on the years 1956-1963 and devotes special attention to the expressions of Dante Moreira Leite and Luiz Pereira on the subject. The central argument is that the transformation of Sao Paulo city into a great metropolis became the articulating theme with which both authors investigated the performance and adaptation of school-age children, especially those identified as suburbanIII. A new urban culture challenged the school structure and, based on the legacy of Antonio Candido and Florestan Fernandes, such questions were investigated with a new pattern of research, which became the mark of CRPE-SP at that time. This new research pattern paved the way for new analytical resources to be mobilized to study the intelligence of children at school. The shortcomings of biological parameters for understanding the phenomenon of failure and its significant numbers were demonstrated. In addition to a new anthropological understanding about the interaction between the school culture and ways of living of the urban fringes, the research pattern established enriched the repertoire of sociological analyzes of the expansion in the number of school places in Sao Paulo city. For that sociology of education which then renewed, the strongly exclusionary nature of school failure was demonstrated in a masterly manner.