Os males de origem da educação brasileira segundo Manoel Bomfim

Abstract

In order to build up a better world, it is necessary to know the problems that slow down its achievement. There were some outstanding thinkers in the past, who tried to explain our woes; one of these remarkable personas is Manoel Bomfim (1868-1932). A man who believed education was the path to solve the dilemmas of the brazilian reality and who expressed his convictions in a large array of literary productions. We developed this study intending to comprehend the way Bomfim understood our original woes related to the educational area and to the educational public policies area. To that end, we used as sources his discourse entitled “O Progresso pela Instrucção” (1904) and the book named “A América Latina: Males de Origem” (1905), both publicized in a transitional time in our history. As a main goal, we analyzed the content in the sources to perceive, in Bomfim, what was his worldview and what were his ideas to solve the existing problems. Our specific goals were: a) bring out, from the sources, the political and pedagogical thought of Manoel Bomfim; b) identify the thinker’s main ideas on the educational and political areas; c) discuss Bomfim’s educational project related to the national project he intended to build up. Thus, we aimed to answer the following question: from his first discourse and essay about the interpreting of the nation, how did Manoel Bomfim understood the brazilian society and the educational woes of his time? Articulating text and context, we chose the historical-critical methodology as a theoretical and methodological foundation for our paper. It is structured in five chapters: introduction, where we establish the base for our study; contextualization, where we reconstitute parts of Manoel Bomfim’s life; analysis of the discourse “O Progresso pela Instrucção”; analysis of the book “A América Latina: Males de Origem”; and, finally, our final considerations. Among these, we noted that the set of views that inspired Manoel Bomfim had been mostly created abroad in historic times previous to his. We also pointed out that, strictly, any of the thinker’s productions is an attempt to relate the facts and knowledge of his time. Yet we observe that Bomfim’s ideas for education were radically turned toward the building of a nationally critic pedagogy.