Between the pioneering spirit and impasse: the 1920 São Paulo state reform

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the current concerns with the improvement of the quality of brazilian primary education schools, the text re-examines the reform of 1920 in São Paulo State, which made explicit the political dilemma that would last for the whole of the 20th century between the expansion and the quality of school systems. The historical importance of that reform has been recognized in view of its pioneering attempts at innovating teaching methods and rationalizing management procedures. The conflict is pointed out here between the curriculum proposals of the reform and its proclaimed priority of achieving widespread children literacy in the State of São Paulo when the first four years of primary education had been shortened by the same reform to a period of two years with two and a half hours daily attendance. The reform brings about in a technically justifiable way the "solution" of reducing daily attendance as a condition to increase places at school. Such measures then became generalized practices in education systems throughout the country. The present work also investigates the contradictions evidenced in that reform between the first assimilations of the New School pedagogy and the tendency to simplification and impoverishment of the Brazilian state school. In the present moment when the universalization of education in Brazil seems to configure a new level of demand, requiring new political solutions to achieve high quality in education, the text focuses in retrospect the kind of political solution employed by the 1920 reform in São Paulo, highlighting its unanticipated and undesirable results, in the hope of contributing to a better resolution of the challenges faced today.