School desks in the material school culture of Bahia’s education

teaching knowledge, medical-hygienist knowledge (1880-1885)

Abstract

With a proposal to the axis History of education and the body, hygiene and materialities, this article presents a micro-historical clipping about school material culture in the province of Bahia from the attempt to replace school desks in the two normal schools in its capital, Salvador, that were of the North American model - as well as in the public classes of the parishes of the same city - by a batch of new ones of German origin, in 1881, during the management of the general director of instruction Cônego Romualdo Barroso. It traces the relationships between the materiality of school desks, teaching knowledge and its relationship with hygienist medical knowledge, between 1881 and 1885, using as sources the four reports of the aforementioned Director General of Public Instruction, from 1881 to 1884; requests sent by teachers of public classes in the province of Bahia requesting school furniture; the article by physician Antônio Pacifico Pereira, published in the magazine Gazeta Médica da Bahia, in January 1881, on Hygiene in schools. It is anchored in the perspective of French Cultural History of social practices, micro historically problematizing the evidence and traces of school cultural practices expressed in projects, prescriptions, opinions of commissions on school furniture. Its historiographical basis is the Brazilian production of authors in the field of History of Education from the analytical categories of School Culture, School Material Culture, School Materiality and School Hygiene.