Helena Antipoff and the Rosário Farm: the education by the work for the "exceptional" children and adolescents in 1940s

Abstract

This article is about a historical research, based on documental sources, whose analysis made the history of Rosario Farm emerge. It was an institution created in 1940 by the Russian psychologist and educator Helena Antipoff, to receive, in a boarding school system, "exceptional" children from Belo Horizonte. It was examined the pedagogical actions, the profile and the trajectory of the interns, moreover, the reactions to the institutionalization process - understood as an instrument of dominant sections of society to conserve the current order, with the purpose to detect the different and isolate it, in a structure of social organization that produces contradiction. Under the orientation of this reference, it was verified if the actions applied by Helena Antipoff had taken care of to the necessities of the children and of the institutionalized teenagers or if they were established as an answer to the social environment in which the institution was placed. It was concluded that the formation of the children had for objective making them able for the labor market and the conducting wire of the activities was the work itself that replaced the studies and the games and made them to behave as grown-up workers This education aimed at to the production of the adaptation of the interns to an already-shaped social reality, being, therefore, the education only a path, indeed, to protect and conserve the social order.