Progress for instruction: Manoel Bomfim and the social function of teaching

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the speech Progress by Instruction made in 1904 by the intellectual Manoel Bomfim (1868-1932) to graduates of the Normal School of Federal District, in Rio de Janeiro city, during a diploma award ceremony. As a teacher of the institution and class patron, Bomfim analyses the country’s political, economic and social conjectures at the same time that he evokes the state to invest in primary education and encouraging the young teachers to take on the integral formation of the new generation of republican citizens. We seek to understand, historically, this barely studied source by the historiography of Brazilian education by establishing relations between the author’s positioning and the context that made it viable. With this study, we understand that Bomfim’s speech gets along the initiatives at the time in favor of combating mass illiteracy as a condition to modernize the country. That way, our intention is to contribute with the expansion of the current analysis of the social role of teaching throughout the First Republic, since the primary school, in his perspective, would enable the progress of the nation, provided adequate training and engagement of the teaching personnel, therefore, the emotional content of the author’s speech as a strategy for convincing and support.