A DISCURSIVE ENUNCIATION, A POWER OF SPEECH

The widening of debates on the Constitutional system, and their subjection to the scrutiny of public opinion, differentiated the action of the new powers in the context of the liberal monarchies of the 19^th century. The power of the word was of central relevance and the legislators’ speeches were immediately archived for future memory. The body of discourses formed by the parliamentary debates of the Brazilian Constituent Assembly and the Portuguese Cortes Gerais e Extraordinárias (Constituent Assembly) therefore established not only a collection of arguments, but also an enunciative field, from which I have drawn, in this article, an approach to the issues of public education.

An enunciative field as defined in this case is a homogeneous set of documents, well circumscribed in time, which tells us both about the statements describing the state of education and about the way in which the MPs established their legitimacy: they preferentially extolled the relevance of the education of the people for the maintenance of their political positions.

Without leaving this enunciative field, to the MPs’ speeches, I have gathered bills, memoirs and treatises on education representing the many that appeared in the 1820s and beyond. With the parliamentary debates and the memoirs on education, I set up a capturing place of what, having been proclaimed, reaffirmed, and legislated, constituted the message for the addressees of the 1820s, and for their successors (MPs, legislators, teachers, pupils). This message was translated into educational regulations, attitudes and patterns of behavior that have not entirely left the present horizon.

This excursion into the past of constituent parliaments is not made in order to trace back a specific origin or a foundational beginning. It marks a somewhat singular point of emergence, which the beginning of parliamentarianism as a force field identifies. This emergence opposes the struggle and violence of new commitments, rules and rituals to the violence of the end of the Old Regime and colonialism. By pointing out the beginning of the aspirations of public education for the popular classes, affirmed in America or in Europe in a reasonably similar way, a certain enunciative coherence is offered to the geographical dispersion. I specify, under the argumentative dissent of MPs - the universities or the primary schools? The location of schools on the littoral or in the interior? -, the way in which the most enduring regulations concerning education were (re)launched (the pedagogical devices for ordering teaching, the maintenance of social hierarchies). Finally, it should be noted that the power of a time-limited discursiveness on public education can give us back the exercise of a genealogy of the ways in which we have become what we are (^{Foucault, 2000}; ²⁰⁰⁸).

The expressive and elocutionary power of the MPs was not only rooted in the greater or lesser clamor that their words provoked in the assemblies, nor even in the success or failure of their proposals or bills; but rather in the belonging of the speakers to the state bodies, to that “principle of orthodoxy”, of the order, the social ordering, and the logical-moral integration of the societies. By principle of orthodoxy, Pierre Bourdieu understood the state as holding invisible and barely perceptible powers, which would define it as the opposite of disorder and anarchy, powers only translated into manifestations of public order, of which parliamentary ritual would be the exponent. This logical integration would be the sharing by society of the same perceptions in the construction of reality, and moral integration would be the agreement on sovereign values (^{Bourdieu, 2018}, p. 17).

Within this framework, according to the French sociologist, it would be possible to establish the disagreement of points of view (the dispute between education, for what ends, with what means), starting from an entity, the state, which would neither serve the purpose of the common good nor the purpose of repression for the benefit of the dominant classes, but would serve all this in its infinite expansion. The commitment of the Brazilian and Portuguese MPs to publish their debates certainly established the idea that speakers exposed to the nations the full extent of their thoughts and to the governed the sanction of their decisions. It inscribed what the laws established about public education and, essentially, what could be said about it in that remote past that still reaches us with its summoning power.

THE IDEA OF RAREFACTION: EDUCATION AND RESPECT FOR INSTITUTIONS

The issue of the education of Brazilian youth emerged in the preparatory work of the ^{Assembleia Geral, Constituinte e Legislativa do Império do Brasil [Brazilian Constituent Assembly], in 1823}, as an urgent matter on which depended the support of the new representative system. The constituent MPs made it clear that a plan of education for a free government could not be the same as that of an absolute government, nor could that of an aristocracy be identical to that of a monarchy. A general system of education shaped a form of government that had just proclaimed independence and was crucial to its development and affirmation. To design the general principles of education, the MPs made sure that the scholars of the Empire elaborated a good treatise on physical, moral, and intellectual education. This treatise had to conform Brazilian laws and customs, and it was essential to collect information on the existence of schools and learning establishments in the provinces of the Empire.

The constituent MPs took for granted the diagnosis of the “backwardness in which we find ourselves in regard to education.”¹ The declarations from provinces and municipalities asking for educational establishments, as well as the MPs’ concerns with the illiteracy of the people and the low salaries of primary teachers, confirmed the difficult diagnosis. If the drafting of a general treatise on public education expressed a systematic concern with education, the discussion in 1823 was dominated by the foundation of universities, largely due to the need to educate personnel for the functioning of the state. For this very reason, the opening of law courses was called for while university establishments did not exist. In addition to the maintenance of the political system, education was a determining issue in the separation between despotic and representative governments, granting a freedom that learned men would use to know the laws, have access to jobs and form a “public spirit.”²

The MPs took into consideration an offering to the Constituent Assembly by one of their members, the Memoir on the reform of studies in the Port Authority of São Paulo. This was an 1816 text by MP Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, first holder of the Finance Ministry in the imperial period. They recognised in it “a true method both of teaching and of learning, by the analytical disposition with which it classifies the beginning and gradual progress of human events, and by the indication it makes of the subjects which successively must be taught, of the method to be followed, of the choice of textbooks and their composition.”³ The Memoir spoke of a general education (in relation to which men were to be examined for the development of their faculties, the exercise of humanism and the demands of the state); and a particular education (in which men were to be examined for their condition, natural dispositions, and personal abilities).

On the one hand, it called for a vulgarization of public education, remembering that disseminating education was precisely one of the differences between enlightened and ignorant governments. However, this vulgarisation was adequate to the services that society demanded and was moderated by the division of education into classes, since the state needed “a system of education proportionate to its different functions” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 121); on the other hand, it called for the “assumption that children would find their destinies in the face of unequal conditions of fortune, future occupations and their own intellectual faculties.” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 122)

It is a settled point that this progressive approach, reflecting the family circumstances of the pupils, should be considered from the point of view of the state - “Graduating, then, the various classes of education by these considerations, I conclude that the sum of the knowledge offered to each man must be proportioned to the services of different kinds which the state expects” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 122). A weighting which estimated the time each child could spend studying and the personal conditions (attention span, memory, intelligence). This combination of the needs and expectations of the state, the social condition of the children and their intellectual capacities, introduced a principle of rarefaction into public education, seen backwards as an improvement of men and as an instrument of state prosperity. “Even if we want the nation to have a certain degree of knowledge, we do not want everyone to devote themselves to the sciences”, said MP Hollanda Cavalcanti.⁴ The rarefaction was justified, forwards, by the unshakeable defence that education should obey the political foundations of parliamentary power and should not be dissipated. A “generic education detached from our institutions will make men ready for all systems, a sort of flexible mass apt to receive all kind of impressions.”⁵

Martim Ribeiro de Andrada’s proposal focused teaching on a well-defined hierarchical set of knowledges. The great component of the first stage of education or first class was “to teach each one those truths which are useful and necessary to all, whatever their profession or inclination, attending to the degree of their capacity and the time they can dispose of” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 122). The second kind or second level had to do with those studies which were related to a profession and would help professional development. And the third, “purely scientific”, was designed “for the improvement of the human species through new findings.” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 123)

Ribeiro de Andrada sustained that all or almost all elements of society should be able to have access to the first two stages, leaving for the third and more elevated stage further comments. He also defended, besides state schools, the existence of free teaching by private masters (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 124) and the conception and choice of textbooks made by the masters for the second level (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 138). For primary school, the textbooks were to be made under state inspection and should contain elements that would help the pupils to create notions of good and evil, which would also have to be graded and reconfirmed. The great examples of the past would make the children reflect the desire to imitate them. Ribeiro de Andrada even used the word “invention” to refer to the result of the reconfirmation, by the students, of what they had learned, as if it were their own discovery:

Stories, then, at this stage [studies of the second year of schooling or second year of primary school], should be intended to awaken moral ideas, and to excite the boy who forms them; to give them greater scope and exactness, and finally to lead the boy to understand the precepts of morality, or better to invent them. For such teaching it is enough that the master unravels the thread, which has directed the inventions, shows the path they have trodden; and I am sure the disciple will at last arrive at equal results. A similar method is of utmost need, especially in the study of moral sciences because the imperative laws and our will are not born from the view of sensitive objects, but from the reflection of each individual on his intimate feeling, on his internal self. (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 128)

The author examined the second type of education or second stage as a time when educators could start to outline for each of the pupils an itinerary of possibilities, the pupils’ faculties being awake and more developed. Education should recognise how far each one would go, in view of the social conditions of the pupils. The recognition of shrewder intelligences directed pupils to progress in line with the third stage of education. Reflections on this level were not developed in the Memoir, although they were directly linked to the new rationale defended by the parliamentarian regime. In fact, it would be those achievements that would later help to prove the difference between the old colonial tyranny and the new regime. By focusing his reflection on the first two levels, Ribeiro de Andrada was aware of the epistemological cut that education for the people could operate, in two senses. One, regarding the need for general education to fight against the yoke that the illustrated class exerted on the others, at the expense of the total ignorance of the latter, a notion that would be in tune with Brazil’s independence aspirations and with the announcement of parliamentarism as a representative form of government. At the same time, a system of proportionate, progressive education, based on the inequality of the persons’ intellectual faculties and on the amount of time they could make available, was declared as an instrument that the state could use to its advantage.

CONQUERING THE SOUL OF PUPILS

The primary school, intended to prepare the exercise of all public and private functions, was utilitarian for the addressees; and was, undoubtedly, an operation unfolded in practices that stamped a seal of truth on the acquired knowledge. Its transmission through ideas was an entirely ideological operation.

It was a matter of acting on the personality of the students, of bearing in mind their specific levels of intelligence and sensitivity and submitting them to a common reason. It was not enough that society formed men, it was necessary to “reach the soul of the children” so that it would be “gradually disposed to listen to the oracles of truth, to recognize their voice, and not confuse it with the sophistries of imposture” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 121-122). The first and most common education had, therefore, three objectives: to transmit useful and necessary truths, as I have already stated; to know well the character traits to adequate them in function of the common life; and to make available the precise knowledge in function of the occupation to which the pupils were destined.

The state principle as “orthodoxy” could be more or less subtly stated in the first public education: the Memoir, more than the systematization of knowledge, exposed the attempt to build a “morally united environment”, to use the expression of the sociologist Émile Durkheim. This moral environment was the result of the contract between governors and governed, which Ribeiro de Andrada had no doubts would be profitable to all. The pupils always had classes with the same master, acquiring over time, and in that way, “unity of education and unity of character” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 125). The state would provide a classroom, whose size was designed in function of the school classes, enforcing the principle of providing the same moral environment for the pupils and concentrating all learning in this moral magma. The pupils had to learn through books specifically designed for this learning, in which, on the one hand, the words were dissociated from things, since the textbook had to contain “isolated and unconnected words” to which the meaning was attributed by the teacher (“of which the teacher can bestow a more precise intelligence”). These textbooks displayed “simple or clear sentences” which prevented a dispersion of ideas and encouraged the observation of objects through which the students would develop their ideas.

Although Ribeiro de Andrada referred to this process as an “invention”, the students were invited to discover as their own the observations previously written to indicate the objects to which they referred. And the masters, in their turn, should deeply know all and every one of the words of the textbook in order to explain them to the pupils. This broadly meant that possible unforeseen meanings that might be attributed to the words would have no place. Ribeiro de Andrada stated that, during the first decade of children’s lives, the feelings that aroused their soul were “compassion for men and animals”, the “extensive germs of filial tenderness and sweet friendship”, which the school should bring to the surface. It was necessary, therefore, to “descend to those depths of the soul.” (^{Durkheim, 1938}, p. 39)

In the second year of schooling, the masters endeavoured to perfect the feelings aroused in the first year, replacing one by the other: piety had to give way to beneficence, humanity gave way to recognition and the desire to repay the benefits received. This operation, according to Ribeiro de Andrada, was absolutely necessary “because the imperative laws and our will are not born from the sight of sensible objects, but from the reflection of each individual on his intimate feeling, on his internal self” (Andrada, 1936 [1816], p. 128). It was not so much a question of providing children with knowledge, but of arousing deep inner states in them, as Émile Durkheim stated in a history of teaching’s course in France in 1904-05 (^{Durkheim, 1938}). Awakening moral sentiments in children through public education, freeing them from ignorance, involved a movement of conversion. “True conversion is a profound movement by which the whole soul, by turning in a completely new direction, changes its position, its base, and consequently modifies its point of view on the world.” (^{Durkheim, 1938}, p. 38)

This kind of conversion, which had been born in Church schools, could be considered against the “old monkish system” and against corporal punishment (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 131), since it carried new values and secular purposes. But a movement of general orientation of the profane spirit and will was, likewise, the most adequate to sustain a principle of orthodoxy emanating from the state, understood as “the principle of organisation of consent as compliance with the social order” (^{Bourdieu, 2018}, p. 18). The ban on religious teaching as seen by Ribeiro de Andrada kept away from the pupils “all kinds of discriminations”, “extreme ambition” or “greed”, in order to inculcate in children’s hearts the “respect of their masters” and the “desire to be diligent and loved” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 131).

Docility in hearts evidently had at its root a rapture for values suitable for the gradual reproof of the “unceasingly reborn passions” of children. In schools, the moral sentiments initially developed by teachers able to embody the role of directors of the soul had a predictable result: “they will partly destroy the natural versatility of the boys and serve as a torch for the good direction of their passions” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 133). The Memoir smoothly sketched out the aims that public education would develop as an emanation of the new parliamentary and representative state: the attempt to extend a basic education to the whole population, the state’s desire to educate its civil servants, the highly disciplinary aims at supporting social order and the rarefaction of opportunities in face of personal fortune and general functions of society.

Sketched out in the Constituent Assembly (which would be dissolved in November 1823), the concern with primary school was taken up again in the work of the new Assembleia Geral Legislativa [General Legislative Assembly] in 1826. A somewhat divided perception of public education was established between an elementary education necessary for the exercise of the peoples’ trades and crafts and for the recognition of the new established powers; and a university education for a handful of elected representatives who, although necessary for the functioning of the state, would always be few. This perception swung between the desire for examination of advanced studies by the established powers (in defending, for instance, the proximity of the University to the Court in Rio de Janeiro) and the desire for education of the people, so that they would more willingly accept the supremacy of legislators:

Revolutions and seditions are more common among the rude people, agitated by demagogues: the people, who know how to read and write, have more means to instruct and employ themselves, and are better aware of their own interest of living in subordination. (^{José da Silva Lisboa [Barão de Cayrú], Senado do Império do Brasil, Ano de 1826, Volume I, sessão de 1826-5-20, p. 108})

The university being in this Court, it will form a seedbed for students with solid doctrine, who can then exercise teaching in other universities, with perfect public and governmental security. (^{José da Silva Lisboa, Assembleia Geral Constituinte e Legislativa do Império do Brasil, Tomo VI, sessão de 1823-10-18, p. 138})

TEACHERS’ AUTONOMY

Although ordered to be printed,⁶ the Memoir was not discussed again. Another general treatise on education served as a model for the bill on public education, presented to the Assembleia Geral Legislativa [General Legislative Assembly].⁷ It adapted the Portuguese military officer Francisco de Borja Garção Stockler’s plan, also presented to the liberal Portuguese Constituent Parliament (1821) and first outlined in 1799. The Brazilian MPs turned it into a draft bill with few adjustments. The most notable divergence was the erasure, by the Brazilian MPs, of articles concerning the management of schools and teaching work by groups of teachers. Stockler suggested the creation of teachers’ corporations of second, third and fourth-level schools (called Colleges of Teachers), which should meet regularly to discuss the organization and running of the schools. Every two weeks they had to meet with the pupils to deliberate on ways of improving the sharing of ideas and the progress of knowledge. In second-level schools the teachers in first-level schools were admitted to the meetings. In locations with more than one second-level school, there should be a monthly meeting of all these teachers’ colleges, the so-called councils of public education, and its proceedings should be carefully recorded.

Garção Stockler urged a discussion apparently open to deepening the teachers’ reflections. “After the oral discussion, each teacher will be free to give his opinion in writing; and even when it happens that the subjects are not sufficiently elucidated in the discussions, the president will ask all the teachers to present their opinion and the reasons that support it in the following session, in writing, and organized more serenely” (^{Stockler 1826}, p. 309). At the end of each school year, the colleges and the education councils would send the results of the discussions and their proposals to the governing and supervisory body of the schools.

Although the establishment, operation and objectives of teachers’ colleges were not provided for in the bill presented to the House of Commons, the colleges were mentioned in the articles on the management and inspection of public schools, most likely because the MPs had transposed Garção Stockler’s text, almost in its entirety, without much concern for adaptation. Both the treaty and the draft bill gave the direction of public education to a corporation of “enlightened men”, who had, among others, the competence to appoint teachers for first and second-level schools and to appoint extraordinary substitutes on an interim basis for third and fourth-level schools when there were no substitutes. When there were regular substitutes, the corporation of enlightened men could only take “notice of the merits of the applicants.”⁸ The activity of teachers’ colleges was specifically foreseen when teaching positions in first-level schools became vacant, with the colleges opening a call, examining the candidates, and proposing their ordering - with the board of public education ratifying the classification.

In Garção Stockler’s proposal, the teachers’ colleges had another important role: to appoint the most competent teacher to supervise the organisation of the library, the natural history museum and the cabinet for machines and models, facilities that should exist in each second-level or higher school. Each teachers’ college, for its part, was to be equipped with chemistry laboratories, under the responsibility of the teacher of the discipline. In the draft bill, the installation and funding of museums, laboratories and cabinets was the responsibility of the board of education. It is only possible to speculate why the important and forerunner article on the pedagogical management of schools by teachers would not have deserved transcription into the draft bill. Perhaps it was because, in the parliamentary discussions, the MPs had almost always defended a strong centralisation of powers and it did not seem convenient to them to have a great deal of discursive and organisational freedom, which, moreover, included the disciples.

In Martim Ribeiro de Andrada’s Memoir it was the “literary societies”, composed of wise individuals and of recognised public merit, who were responsible for the nomination of the masters and the appointment of the Director of Studies. Only at the time of the founding of the establishments would the Sovereign appoint the Director of Studies, if the literary societies had not been created.

The Director of Studies was the guardian and administrator of the proper running of the schools, inspector of classes, director of libraries, cabinets and museums and organizer of a quarterly meeting of city teachers of São Paulo, to take the state of progress of the classes. The relationship of Andrada’s assumptions with Stockler’s was in the statement that, except in a period of initial organisation, it was shown that teachers and school managers should not be under the direct jurisdiction of the established political powers, at least not without the existence of an intermediary power from another area, scientific rather than political.

MASTERS, TEXTBOOKS, AND ANTHOLOGIES

The division into four stages of Stockler’s proposal (Pedagogies, Lyceums, Gymnasiums, Academies) was based on an increasing complexity of the subjects taught and was conformed, in the face of this complexity, to the professional destinies of the students, just like Ribeiro de Andrada’s proposal. In the uniformity of their transmission, the subjects of this plan were not only about knowledge, they also generated magnificent examples (supported by the past) and developed the spirit of public life according to the observation of good manners. The morality that the studies conveyed would instigate the virtue of ideas and the nobility of feelings, as was expressed in the House of Commons.

No one, Mr. President, will doubt that human knowledge makes man more thoughtful and moral because ideas about virtue penetrate to the heart and excite noble and virtuous feelings in him. (Agreed.) Wise men, as generally speaking, are the least fierce and the best morigerous. (Agreed.) (...) The great examples stamped in the writings of the wise men excite high feelings, develop the public spirit and inspire the love of glory. (^{Marcos Antonio Brício or Marcos Antonio de Souza, Câmara dos Senhores Deputados do Império do Brasil, Ano de 1826, Tomo IV, sessão de 1826-8-5, p. 55})

What is the most important way to encourage morality? It is by promoting public education so that man, knowing his rights, knows how to respect them in his fellow men and also knows his duties to the nation. (^{Ernesto Ferreira França, Câmara dos Senhores Deputados do Império do Brasil, Ano de 1830, Tomo II, sessão de 1830-9-13, p. 505})

Gentlemen, the true way to repel crime is civilisation, morality and primary education. (^{Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, Câmara dos Senhores Deputados do Império do Brasil, Ano de 1830, Tomo II, sessão de 1830-9-14, p. 508})

In the debates on a section of Stockler’s plan, which resulted in the approval of the law for the creation of primary schools in the Empire (1827), the willingness to exclude corporal punishment from teaching was evident. “Young people are taught good manners and docility”, said MP Cunha Mattos.⁹ The palmer was typical of despotism and oppression, from which the public education of the parliamentary system meant a break. In accordance with what Martim Ribeiro de Andrada had written, the central elements for pupils to learn according to good manners were the masters, on the one hand, and the existence of textbooks and anthologies, on the other. “The textbooks designed for the first level of education, enclosing in it more [simple] elements, and principles of generally acknowledged truth, which never experience the influence of new discoveries, should be composed under the surveillance and inspection of the state” (^{Andrada, 1936} [1816], p. 137). Teachers were to be exemplary in their own lives to teach reading, writing, counting, grammar and moral and religious principles; the textbooks were to exacerbate the “pureness of language” and contain the “usefulness of doctrine.”¹⁰ Both could not be neutral, they had to obey the demand for uniformity in education.¹¹

The idea that the expansion of public education was inextricably linked to the preservation of the political system, the stability of institutions, the respect for laws and the sharpening of the state machinery followed an understanding shared by the new political systems established in the 19^th century. The historical transformations that led to the Portuguese Liberal Revolution (1820) and Brazil’s Independence (1822), with the beginning of representative parliamentary regimes, suited a government of a paternalistic nature, in which the spread of enlightenment by the people and the happiness of the nation were part of the process of building a patriotism that, rejecting the nefarious recent past, would make use of exemplary and great lives to strengthen the present.

A RELIGIOUS, DISCIPLINARY, AND MORAL APPROACH

The Portuguese nation that emerged from the revolutionary movement of 24 August 1820 offered the people a constitution (1822), just as the Brazilian Empire emerged from the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and Pernambuco separatism (1824). The most enduring Constitution of Brazil, sustained on the “conservative principle of citizens’ rights” (^{Nogueira, 2012}, p. 66), clarified that all powers were delegated by the nation, which held sovereignty. It ratified the power of a politically and administratively centralizing liberal monarchy, warned about the dangers of possible internal divisions, and sanctioned the development of parliamentary practice. With the political imperial Constitution of 1824, the municipalities ensured local administration functions which put an end to colonial logics, and they were responsible for supervising the primary schools.

In ^Portugal, the nation started to be the “revolutionary political reality, with its ‘national’ assembly”, holder of sovereignty; the constitution ensured civil rights as limits on state power, protected by the law, and sanctioned the structure of the state; individual rights were regulated by civil law (^{Hespanha, 2004}, p. 69-74). For the new state machine to be able to establish itself and operate, the bases of the Portuguese constitution called for both the conditions of access to public functions, for which citizens had to be admitted “with no other distinction than that of their capacities and virtues”, and the implementation of a “uniform and regular plan of education and public schooling” for all.¹²

The liberal school project evidenced, from the outset, a universalist ambition, an attempt to establish a free and compulsory public education for basic education, confronted in Portugal with the illiteracy of the nation, which would remain stable well beyond the middle of the 19^th century. It deepened a model of discipline and morality developed by the Church, of a pastoral nature (^{Ó, 2003}, p. 111), with historical roots in the standards of religion, sciences and philosophy and in the development, especially from the 16^th century, of schooling practices. Illustrative examples of this pastoral care in the form of emulation, moralising and disciplinary practices, and the need for education to foster the services of the state, could easily be found in almost all the educational projects, pre-revolutionary or revolutionary, which came into the hands of Portuguese MPs by the 1820s.

These were the cases of the mentioned Garção Stockler’s project, and the books of two of his compatriots, Mouzinho de Albuquerque and Almeida Garrett. Luís da Silva Mouzinho de Albuquerque wrote Ideias sobre o estabelecimento da instrução pública dedicadas à nação portuguesa e oferecidas a seus representantes [Ideas on the establishing of public education devoted to the Portuguese nation and offered to its representatives] (1823) in Paris, where he was in exile. He was admitted to the Royal Navy Academy where he studied mathematics and studied physics and chemistry in Paris. He was the administrator of the National Mint and regent of the discipline of physics and chemistry at the Royal Mint Laboratory. He was minister of the Kingdom, inspector of Public Works and MP.

João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett was MP in several state legislatures, House of Lords member, minister of Foreign Affairs, Supreme Chronicler of the Kingdom, director of the Conservatory and General Inspector of Theatres. Famous writer in various domains (prose, theatre, poetry, literary criticism, journalism), he wrote Da Educação (On Education) (1829), a treatise on general education, also in exile, in London.

All the moralising practices for the adjustment of conducts and for the state service carried the same rarefaction premise of public education that I have already pointed out. This premise examined what the individuals in power relations should know, indexing unquestionable truths to their subjectivity. Education could not succeed without obedience and submission actions. The practice of power assumed “voluntary” agreement to such acts, starting from childhood.

Stockler wrote that children should be admitted to the first-level schools at the age of eight, and before the age of ten, to ensure attendance at the several stages of education and make them able to serve the state (^{Stockler, 1826}, p. 265). He also made explicit what subjects the textbooks or anthologies should contain. The textbooks for pupils in the first year of primary schools, for example, were supposed to include stories that would underpin the teaching of the first moral feelings and the behaviour of individuals at all stages of life, which were to be “engraved on the hearts” of children: compassion for the sick, gratitude towards benefactors, filial tenderness towards parents, respect for citizens who were good role models. The same means and identical purpose were registered by Mouzinho de Albuquerque, when referring to books and other pedagogical tools. They had to inspire a morality, in which love of the mother country, and high feelings (such as steadiness, serenity, constancy and virtuosity) were on a level with each other (^{Albuquerque, 1823}, p. 19-20).

The MP and writer Almeida Garrett, as well as Garção Stockler, drew attention to the relevance of the discipline of history, in which the life and achievements of celebrated and notable figures, who were to be adopted as models (^{Garrett, 1829}, p. 120-121; p. 128) (^{Stockler, 1826}, p. 289-290), were preponderant.

The moralising and civic requirements, observing the constitutional rights and obligations, not only were outlined in the many offers of didactic materials sent to the Commission of Public Education during the Constituent (such as the memoirs and catechisms on education), but they were in tune with the Parliament’s expressed desire to fight for the installation of schools in cities, towns and places and so that the Portuguese youth could learn to read, write and count. They were also in tune with the petitions to the Sovereign Congress [Parliament], for the placement of primary school teachers. The subjects intended for elementary school were ruled by the imposing of rules of obedience and were always in between the acquisition of some knowledge and the demand for some conduct.

The didactic practice, prescribing knowledge, intertwined with the building up of ways of being, continued and developed a tradition, started around the 17^th century, of ordering the legitimate knowledge and regulating behaviours. The students, organized by classes and classrooms, received texts “previously controlled, selected, decontextualized and expurgated”, in operations establishing the legitimate knowledge in order to be compatible with the religious doctrines of the pedagogical institutions (^{Ó, 2017}, p. 79). In this sense, it is possible to draw a continuity between practices of religious teaching and practices of secular teaching.

There is no significant difference in the practical work of organising the knowledge administered and in the models of existence pursued between the religious order and the political order, between a school institution which in the 16^th century poured into its textbooks the Christian heritage or the one which, a hundred or two hundred years later, would seek to erect a civil science, the rights of states and the duties of the citizen. (^{Ó, 2017}, p. 82)

The authors of the projects of public education for the nation not only watched the harmonization with this heritage but also made it refer to a mental construction that adjusted the learning of the students to successive levels of cognition and successive social destinies in the service of the nation-state. This was how education was divided into grades, which fostered the growing need for erudition in accordance with future occupations (^{Stockler, 1826}, p. 262-263), and, equally, the growing complexity of the knowledge acquired.

The need to circumscribe what could be known was expressed by ordering the use of textbooks for the students and the teachers themselves. To the pedagogical device of the textbook, which would guarantee the ordering and sequencing of knowledge, but never its reworking for unforeseen purposes, were added two essential pedagogical devices which dated back to the Antiquity and which reappeared and were renewed more or less around the 17^th century: the curriculum and the class. The first one was the mechanism legitimising of knowledge that, gathered, selected and, above all, purged from its place of origin (the world of discovery from which it came), would be valid to be learnable. The second one would, over time, group pupils according to age or knowledge, building a fundamental homogeneity as if it were consubstantial to learning,¹³ a phenomenon which the educational proposals of the early 1800s sent to parliamentarians already showed.

Just as in the public education projects received by the Sovereign Congress, it was also possible to find in the parliamentary speeches acts of political faith claiming that the MPs should generalise the advantages of education to all citizens, at the same time as this universality was limited to elementary education. To imagine this constraint, it is true that parliamentarians argued with the Treasure difficulties; but, mainly, they argued with considerations about the kind of citizen they had in mind to stand up for the constitutional cause and occupy their place in it. As one MP put it in 1822: “civil society is very interested in all citizens having a knowledge of the first letters, and of their civil and religious obligations.”¹⁴

It is necessary to establish as many primary schools as are needed so that all citizens can comfortably learn to read, write, count and the catechism. This education is what the government has the obligation to provide for each citizen just as it demands services from each of them, given that without municipal offices, tax collection, warehouses, etc., cannot be properly carried out. From then on it is up to those who want to acquire greater knowledge and must spend at their own expense on teaching them (^{José Peixoto Sarmento de Queirós, Cortes Gerais e Extraordinárias da Nação Portuguesa, Ata de 1822-3-29, Diário n.º 47, p. 660})

It would surely be an audacious act, of which I am not capable, to come today to the bosom of the national representation, and to the centre of knowledge, to recommend you the significance of public education and the culture of sciences as the most effective means of reforming people’ s customs, and strengthening the form of government that we have adopted (^{Filipe Ferreira de Araújo e Castro, Apresentação do Relatório dos Negócios do Reino [Presentation of the Kingdom’s Business Report], Câmara dos Senhores Deputados da Nação Portuguesa, Ata de 1823-1-2, Diário n. 1, p. 323})

The academics and promoters of the educational cause, reformers and revolutionaries of the dawn of the 19^th century were among the first to establish the modern school, wishing it to be for the broad public. They also started the fostering of an incompatibility with this openness, which would be strengthened by the idea that only a minority of the population would be destined to the highest aspirations. This is how one could understand the professional destinies that were linked to the levels of education, as if it were a matter of a natural social stratification.

If every project for dividing up the classes of public education began by stating that the first level was intended for all members of society, whatever their condition, status or profession, the subsequent levels had in mind destinations that were expressed, from the outset, in the form of the professions that a social hierarchy had agreed upon. By other methods, some of which were revolutionary (such as the will to expand elementary schooling to all), this openness continued, at its origin, the secular differences between higher and lower studies.¹⁵ It was not surprising, therefore, that for farmers, tradesmen and craftsmen, the knowledge to be acquired was that which would improve “the proper exercise of their occupations.” (^{Stockler, 1826}, p. 274).

It would not be inappropriate, therefore, to look upon the school subjects which the revolutionaries and their followers proposed in the projects of public education, and the remarks on the need for textbooks, as the beginning, under the constitutional monarchy, of the gathering together of a knowledge of which the teachers would be only, if possible, mere transmitters. If public education was structured under the motto of the teaching of a certain kind of knowledge, not open to the demands of experimentation and the dialogical relationship between teachers and students (^{Ó, 2017}, p. 96); if, since the Portuguese Liberal Revolution and the proclamation of Brazilian independence, it was established that the model stories with which children would be confronted would have no other interpretation than that which subjected forms of behaviour to the acquisition of a moral, perhaps one could conceive that the great nourishment of the school would not be the acquisition of knowledge. It would rather be the inexhaustible capacity to merge the formation of subjects with rules and procedures to obtain that knowledge.

The entire school building would have been oriented, in our modern times, towards the dynamics of copying, long thought out and shaped even in the midst of revolutionary action: the small and exact statements with which schooling was to begin, in order to develop the gradual intelligence of the children (whose doubts would always return to the previously prepared explanations) would be the revelation of a representative system in which the leaders struggled to involve the people in the most suitable constitutional life. Those questions, as the Brazilian constituent MP José Joaquim Carneiro de Campos said, could not be allowed to dissipate, nor should the people come to the palaces of their sovereigns carrying their misgivings with them.¹⁶