“Oh! Mockery! You have seen what is a rural school; if you have seen one, you have seen all, in the material and in the moral sense”: a study of rural school materials, methods and contents in Minas Gerais (1892-1899)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to apprehend the specificities of the rural schools in Minas Gerais, at the end of 19th century, regarding to materials, methods and contents. We used as main sources reports written by schools inspectors and by Interior Secretaries, and messages of the presidents of State. The paper shows that the criticisms about the elementary schools, at the beginning of 1890s, were not limited only to the rural schools. At the end of that decade, however, the rural school is identified as rustic and archaic. This is the result of, on the one hand, a set of practices that allocated to it a marginal place in the government policies; and, on the other hand, a discursive production elaborated by narrators from the cities that identify it with inactivity and precariousness.