Higienismo e educação escolar na Paraíba republicana: do discurso médico à prática educativa

Abstract

The hygienist ideal, with its developments in fields such as health and education, constitutes a strong mark of modernity in the context of its process of urbanization and industrialization, with a notable characteristic of the European modernity, which had an important repercussion in the Brazilian society, in the context of its first republican period. The present research tried to point out and to analyze interfaces of this historical process, especially with respect to its interferences in the field of education. The first period of Brazilian Republic (1889-1930) was taken as a historical reference for this work. As methodological option, we resorted to bibliographic and documentary research. Based on the pertinent literature available, we analyzed the repercussion and expansion of the hygienist ideal in Brazil, especially in the speeches, documents and government policies applied to public education, during this period taken for analysis. In this sense, we analyzed the interfaces of the hygienist ideal, present in the school studies elements and in the introduction of Hygiene as a discipline, and also present in the didactic books, some of which we analyze, such as they are used in the class rooms, in the education in/of Paraíba.