Abstract

BARAUSSE, Alberto. “Una impronta di italianitá”: the textbooks for Italian ethnic schools in Brazil between liberalism and fascism. Cad. Hist. Educ. [online]. 2019, vol.18, n.2, pp.329-350.  Epub Sep 26, 2019. ISSN 1982-7806.  https://doi.org/10.14393/che-v18n2-2019-4.

This article intends to investigate the historical process of the policies of production of school books adopted by Italy’s ruling classes for schools abroad. It offers a contribution to understanding the dynamics and complex action that have characterized and followed the development of schooling and of cultural and formative processes, above all those regarding identity, of Italian settlers in Brazil, from the second half of the 19th century to the end of the 1930s. Textbooks have been, since the very beginning of the Italian unification experience, a fundamental tool for the ruling classes that aimed to modernize and especially to homogenize and standardize teaching in a national sense. Along the following decades, the production and circulation of textbooks has increased significantly and so did the development of school publications. The issue also gained great importance when Italian governments promoted a new policy of colonial expansion and mass emigration abroad. After approving a law through which the Crispi government implemented, in 1889, the system of Italian colonial subsidized schools, a problem took place, concerning which textbooks should be introduced in the countries that received Italian immigrants and which characteristics such books should have. This article emphasizes the process of continuity and discontinuity of these policies and of the production of textbooks introduced in Italian schools abroad and in Brazil, specifically until the rise of fascism, to promote different ideas of an Italian identity.

Keywords : Italian colonial schools abroad; Public policies for school books; Ethnicity; National identity and education; Migration and education in Brazil.

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