As escolas isoladas: práticas e culturas escolares no meio rural de Lomba Grande/RS (1940-1952)

Abstract

This study investigates the history of Rural Education from 1940 to 1950 and its relation to the development process of School Cultures in the rural environment. It aims to construct, historically, the process of institutionalization of municipal elementary Isolated Schools in Lomba Grande, a district of Novo Hamburgo, giving evidence to cultural identities as collective constructions that were built in plural relationships established by different social groups. Rebuilding the schooling processes of the two remaining institutions, namely EMEF Bento Gonçalves and EMEF Tiradentes, allowed the understanding in relation to how they overlap practices and representations of an education still incipient in its teaching structures. These aspects are related to the first half of the twentieth century, made up from tuition, grants, and Isolated Schools of multigraded classes. The research involved collecting memories from students and teachers at Isolated Schools in Lomba Grande, as well as methodological procedures focused on Oral History and historical document analysis, from which emerged a whole set of empirical data. Memories were analyzed from the perspective of "social time" in the sense that comes from Halbwachs (2006), that is, by formal or informal relations through various cultural mediations making up the social frameworks of memories. In this process we identified different aspects of a dynamic and hybrid School Culture that produced singularities in the rural community of Lomba Grande. The analysis was structured from the construction of the concept of chips, within the framework of Cultural History. The concept of chips, takes plural and composite forms of constitution. The shape of chips does not exhaust an analytical ability; instead, it opens up possibilities and ramifications for new constructions. It is synthesized in three axes chosen for the study, namely: the development of a type of institutional culture that characterized a possible way to establish schooling processes; the invention of a schooling culture that identified a group of students/teachers, as well as, a professional culture of social practices carried out in the Isolated Schools environment and the social use which was established from the objects and artifacts of the material culture in this space and school time. Therefore, the School Cultures were characterized as products of everyday life, resulting from the action of social groups that define a form of organization. In this process the community influence was quite important to expand the public schools in this where. As for school institutionalization, State policies and community organization were used to have schools in this locality. The construction of a professional culture was compose by the different formative experiences accumulated by the subjects. In relation to the objects and utensils used, was observed the concomitant use of blackboard and notebooks, quill pen and pencil, very common at that time. Certain characteristics were also identified, such as "cartapácio", to name a traditional backpack, the "breiro", a thin banboo stick to reuse the pencil graphite and the “talha”, an antique kind of clay filter to drink water. The School cultures presented themselves dynamically, enhancing the process of cultural translation evidenced by the narratives about the schooling practices. The multigraded Isolated School was the predominant schooling form in Lomba Grande, a possible way by which aspects of formal schooling culture were introduced in the rural environment.