ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS OF RUI BARBOSA AND IN THE MANIFESTO OF THE PIONEERS OF THE NEW EDUCATION (1881, 1932)

Abstract

The concern on the part of Brazilian educational thinkers in favor of a universalizing education is not so recent and persists to the present day. In the last decades of the 19th century, we come across Rui Barbosa (1848 – 1923) who explains his liberal ideas about the changes in the conception of education through the Opinions on primary, secondary and higher education (1881, 1882 and 1883), defending a priori the need for the State to become fully responsible for the provision of education at different stages, from kindergarten to higher education, in addition to guaranteeing access to the lower classes. In the 20th century, more specifically in the third decade, 1932, a group of intellectuals, with different ideologies, came together to write a manifesto that went against the current educational model, thus seeking to break with the old paradigms. The Manifest of the Pioneers of New Education, thus conceived, brings in its structure the main discussions surrounding public and private education, in addition to demarcating the debates around the educational reconstruction of the country. Understood as a study with a qualitative approach, the objective was to present a brief discussion about primary education in Brazil based on Rui Barbosa's 1981 Opinions and the 1932 Manifest of the Pioneers of New Education, identifying some converging points and characterizing the importance of both for the history of our education. Bibliographic research was used as a methodological procedure with consultation of books, articles, dissertations and theses, and documental research in retrospective sources - Rui Barbosa's Opinions (1881) and the Manifest of the Pioneers of New Education (1932). With the study, the results demonstrate the points in which the documents approach and distance themselves from the liberal matrix. However, the documents are holders of incalculable significance, whether in the affirmation of values and objectives to be achieved or as guidelines for the current education model, in addition to having collaborated with the process of historical construction of Brazilian education.