Strategies of control and organization of school functioning

Through the analysis of the legislation of reform, normative instructions, official documents, call notices and contest minutes, one can see how command was practiced in the General Directorate of Public Instruction of the Federal District between 1922 and 1935. The period covering the Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira administrations brings together a series of studies on the control and organization of school functioning. Sometimes seen in their specificity, at other times studied together, the teaching reforms that then succeeded were not only questioned about how to make use of the instruments of command, but also had their relations retraced. I think that the accumulation of the reflections published in the last decade contributed a lot to the understanding of specific questions of the exercise of power in the central organ of school administration of the federal capital at the time.

The research undertaken in the archives of Anísio Teixeira in the CPDOC-FGV by Clarice Nunes resulted in a review of aspects of the reform of the Department of Education of the Federal District in 1932 already quite established in historiographic criticism. On the one hand, it was sought to overcome the myths that involve Anísio Teixeira from the study of his manuscripts and correspondences and, thus, to propose a better understanding of the difficulties that his generation created to our understanding of the historical moment in which they lived (^{Nunes, 2000}, p. 577). On the other hand, ^{Nunes (2000}, p. 578) addressed Anísio's administration as “an intervention that ordered and recreated the school and urban space” and in it she envisaged “the creation of a field for the identification of professional educators.” Most of all, she availed herself of various types of sources to account for the fluidity and plasticity with which Anísio responded to the challenges of his daily life in public administration. Her research conclusions show that the reports, articles, speeches, editorials and decrees used for analysis emerged at different times and situations, with specific objectives and in response to peculiar problems. In this sense, instead of exploring the demiurgical value of the laws and institutions established with the reform of the Department of Education of the Federal District, ^{Nunes (2000}, pp. 396) bets on the intimate relationship between the legal formulas and the power relations implicit in the social movement as an explanatory element of Anísio Teixeira’s action in directing public education of the capital.

The study of the periodicals published by the General Directorate of Public Instruction of the Federal District between 1930 and 1935 carried out by Marta Carvalho (1995, 1997, 1998, 2000) highlights the functions of the Public Education Bulletin as a device for conformation of school practices. Among all the procedures that it analyzes in this sense, the design of the editorial policy of the public education reforms of the capital is the one that best informs about the management program then triggered. It was, first, and according to Carvalho (1997, p. 74), an enterprise that had special conditions of production, circulation and reception of the printed material. As an official vehicle of the central administration of education, the publication of the Bulletin had in the teachers a delimited and very special circle of recipients and, therefore, a circuit of circulation foreseen and guaranteed by the very distribution initiative, besides composing with other strategies triggered by the educational reform. Later, the attention given to the doctrinal control of the school was not based on the prescription of what to read, what not to read and how to read, but “by providing a repertoire of information and critical references that allowed the teacher to assume, himself, the organization and orientation of his readings” (Carvalho, 1997, p.75, 1995, p.66). Finally, two phases can be distinguished in the edition of the Public Education Bulletin. The conception and organization of the four initial issues occurred during Fernando de Azevedo’s direction and focused on the themes and problems that the 1928 reform prioritized. The topics covered by the Bulletin in several of its sections were also present in Fernando de Azevedo's teaching law and speeches, conforming a peculiar pedagogical culture. The subsequent issues of the Public Education Bulletin appeared in Anísio Teixeira’s administration already as a place of accountability for acts of the Department of Education to a wide audience (Carvalho, Toledo, 2000, p 87). At that moment, more than the diffusion and propaganda of precepts, it was important to demonstrate efficacy and administrative honesty. Thus, the Bulletin came to include a greater number of reports, acts, laws, announcements and notices of the division directed by Anísio.

Above all, it is the differences between Azevedo and Anísio that the studies of administrative documentation and of the periodicals published by the Directorate of Instruction perceive. In the same way that Carvalho and Toledo underlined the different strategies of technical support and ordering of the practice of teachers present in the Public Education Bulletin that succeeded from 1928 to 1935, ^{Nunes (2000}, p. 581) also distinguished Anísio's initiatives in relation to predecessors. According to her conclusions, Anísio's management created a strategy that “deepened and qualitatively modified” both the joint policy for the public school network that Fernando de Azevedo and Carneiro Leão initiated and the actions of the Instruction Directorate at the time to change student behavior towards appreciation of health and morality. Fundamentally, studies show that between 1928 and 1935 there were successive redefinitions in the sense of articulating services and rethinking difficult-to-perceive targets in the political discussion about the teaching reforms of the time. In this sense, by analyzing the school programs published between 1928 and 1934, Diana Vidal (1998, p. 95, 2001, p.85) showed that in the discourse, Anísio and Azevedo were committed “to making visible a communion of ideas which, in practice, became scarcely recognizable.” Her observations about the meanings of laboratory teaching and the singularity of Azevedo and Teixeira's reformist actions distinguish the guidelines established for primary education, the rules drawn up for teacher training, and the work of administrative organization carried out by one and the other in the education of Rio de Janeiro.

In order to disentangle the continuity lines established between Anísio and Azevedo, Vidal (1998, p. 85), on the one hand, delved into the differences between primary education programs in the two reforms and, on the other, compared the guidelines indicated for teacher training. First, she noted that while the programs published by Azevedo “resembled a normative text”, the programs published by Teixeira, “became small didactic guides”, perceiving changes in the curricular framework and in the purposes of the teaching activity. Later, the focus on the reorganization of the capital's normal education allowed other distinctions. Thus, Vidal (1998, p.91) warns that if for Azevedo normal education should articulate general culture and specialized preparation, for Anísio this type of course should have the specific character that determined the teaching profession. The analysis also clarifies that “the concept of teaching practice, addressed to exhaustion by Anísio in several texts, was only briefly mentioned in Azevedo’s works” (Vidal, 1998, p.94). As Vidal warns, it is not that for Azevedo practice was not important in the formation of the educator. It happens that, and still according to Vidal (1998, p. 94-95), for him “the dissemination of ideas would transform the practice”, while Anísio, differently, “perceived change not as a simple conquest of propagation of a set of ideas, but as a response to practical action.” Finally, mention is made of the differences in the plans for school buildings and the recomposition of administrative services whose origin was the meaning that Azevedo and Teixeira had of the purposes of the services they were managing. Mainly, Vidal's analyses highlight some contours of these educators’ discursive practice, highlighting the singularities of their actions despite the statements they shared about the desire to give new directions to the country's education.

This perception of the differences in the administrative doing of Azevedo and Anísio in the direction of public education in Rio puts focus on the specificities of management of one and the other. Furthermore, the understanding of the singularities of their reformist actions suggests that the administrative initiatives were also constituted according to conjunctures and individual actions. Although it seems correct to me what is said about the rationalization of education and its processes of organization and control of schoolwork at the time, the administrative record of educators made it possible to unveil specific dynamics and creativity in them. The study of manuscripts, correspondence, reports, articles, speeches and editorials produced by Anísio and Azevedo indicates this. The results of researches by Nunes, Vidal, Carvalho and Toledo into these sources show that the administrative practice between 1927 and 1935 extrapolated the narrow limits of the bureaucratic, stimulating original reflections. On the one hand, Azevedo's performance was illustrative of the articulation of initiatives and services in the General Directorate of Public Instruction of the Federal District and the weight of the networks of alliances that were woven in the Municipal Council and in the press for educational policy. The new Education Code of 1928, the new primary schools, the new building of the Normal School, and the publication of the Public Education Bulletin were constituted through the letters, communications, call notices and appointments that Azevedo controlled. On the other hand, Anísio's texts helped not only to understand the nature of this power, but, above all, to capture the contradictions opened up by the possibilities of public administration of school services. According to Nunes’s view (2000: 594), the 1931-1935 reform was ambiguous, the result of “tension between inflections that pushed it towards a real opening of educational possibilities (...) and, at the same time, to the formulation of authoritarian conceptions”. Therefore, the differences that historiography points out between Azevedo and Anísio do not matter for themselves, but for the problems they pose. Perhaps most politically significant is that while education reform initiatives of the period have not exactly shaped a democratic space for action, they have in fact been constantly redefined by the incidents, obstacles, crises, and resistance encountered. However, at the bottom of the maneuvers of these two periods it is possible to glimpse that, under the discourse of continuity, there existed different strategies of organization of educational work. The study of other administrative sources of the period allows to distinguish further aspects of the way the main administrators of the educational services of the federal capital then exercised the power.

The research into the Minutes of Classification by Merit is an example of these possibilities. It is the record of school directors’ observations regarding the conduct and set of actions and services provided by their assistant teachers in a meeting with the education inspector of their school district. The purpose of this meeting was to elect the assistants classified for merit-based promotion. Most of all, these Minutes were produced to document the process of calculating the results of 1927-1929. They gather accounts of the enormity of threads, of the many channels, of the innumerable fibers that ran through the teaching practice of that time and leave many clues about the incessant passages from teaching to shift superintendence, to school assistance, to the position of librarian, to the function of assistant treasurer, to the administration of school cash, to the direction of parents-teachers association, to school bookkeeping, to warehouse aid, to contest secretariat. Despite the suspicions that can be raised about minutes and, therefore, the difficulties of reading, their content allows to know something of what took place at the meeting and, thus, to consider the maneuvers within the registered discourse. In this sense, the reports inform about the activities accepted, protected or created by the General Directorate of Public Instruction that allowed the “more honorable” profile to distinguish itself. Qualifications such as intellectual preparation and excellent pedagogical orientation, or indications about the taste for teaching and vocation to the teaching profession followed the protocol of appreciation and moral investigation necessary for indication to promotion. Therefore, the great compilation of services that the set of Minutes of the 28 school districts of the capital ends up composing also exposes in the entanglement of the administrative action a whole work of control over teachers’ daily activities. The analysis of the documents gathered at the time suggests that taking care of the courses and procedures of the teaching exercise in the schools of the capital was a way of imposing a system of coercion through evaluation. The number of references to extraordinary and commissioned services, work in rural areas, assiduousness, and performance in literacy classes testifies to the wide network of devices that constituted the teaching work in schools and the pretensions to developing a language based on observation and neutrality for its administration.

Also the attention to statistics organized by the General Directorate of Public Instruction in the period opens good working channels. First because the categories created to quantify the school system’s capacity or to perceive its performance reveal the regularity of services, their results and their reach. Then there is the creation of specific sections for development of the data. So, on the one hand, the need to redefine the secretarial services and general work organization of the central administration pointed out by Carneiro Leão in 1926 would have important developments with the creation of a fourth section in the administrative subdivision of the Directorate of Public Instruction in 1928, in order to, among other attributions, determine the general statistics of education. But it was mainly the organization, in 1932, of a section of school statistics in the Division of School Obligation and Statistics of the Institute of Educational Research that best expressed the need for quantitative assessments concerning the teaching in the federal capital. On the other hand, the quantification of school performance, school-based medical examinations, or the expansion of enrollment and attendance not only served as a tool for administration of educational reforms, but was also a means of producing timely indexes. In this sense, it is significant to accompany the dissemination of the data found in the General Directorate of Education in reports, in the press and in its official publication, the Public Education Bulletin. One soon notices the maneuvers. By the end of 1925, Carneiro Leão had assessed school attendance and performance since 1922 and the school's reach in relation to its installed capacity to show the maximum utilization he obtained from the capital's school network. Between 1927 and 1930, the focus would be different. Without an expressive result in the increase of enrollments and the failure of reform of schools and professional institutes, according to news published in the newspaper O Imparcial on the statistics organized in the Directorate of Instruction in the previous year, the Public Education Bulletin does not disclose these indices. During this period, it seems to have been more interested in giving visibility to the numbers concerning school-based medical inspection activities. From 1928, the numbers found in the medical service of the Directorate were regularly published in several dailies of the capital, and in 1930, they even had an annual balance included in the Public Education Bulletin. In the fouryear period that followed, Anísio Teixeira flaunted much higher numbers in enrollment, in vocational education, in medical services, and in the ratio of public school attendance to installed school capacity. Between 1932 and 1935, Anísio’s Public Education Bulletin and administrative reports explored the results obtained, among other initiatives, with the unfolding of school shifts, the creation of secondary technical education, and the new policy of construction of school buildings. Everything appeared published then, sometimes as proof of the expansion and growth achieved, sometimes as indicative for the organization of schools (^{Teixeira, 1935}, p. 69).

Another example in this direction, the analysis of the communiqués published by the central board of education allows to explore the relations between the administrative practice and the press of the capital. Between 1927 and 1930, the General Directorate of Public Instruction recurrently used the press to send its communiqués. Until then more common in the official press organs of the public power, as was the Bulletin of the City Hall of the Federal District, the communiqués of the instruction office often hit the pages of the great press from 1927. With texts specially written in response to current news, the series of communiqués addressed to the press of Rio de Janeiro by the board of education dealt with the factual. With this, the General Directorate of Education engaged in another type of public debate about education. Instead of discussing ideas and general theories or political positioning on the subject, it held a dialogue about a measure, an attitude or a decision. Published in the press, the statements of the Board of Education disputed the truth of the facts. In the day-to-day coverage of public education, they were interventions from the perspective of interpreting newspaper reports. On the other hand, they proposed ways of signifying events from the perspective of the central administration of education. These texts show not only the most acute and intense polemics in which the Directorate of Instruction was involved but, most of all, the many interferences that the information reported in the press had in the enunciation of facts and the teaching reform initiatives of that time. Aware of both the effects of criticisms on the progress of education reform and the opportunities to reaffirm the effectiveness of the actions taken, the communiqués of the Directorate of Instruction mainly involved legitimating maneuvers. In search of public support, those in charge of education reform responded to criticism and clarified administrative problems using the press. The information reported in newspapers was public, but the fact that they were not always relevant to the group that was in the central administration of education made communication a tension factor. In the struggle to ensure a favorable representation of each procedure of education reform, a continuous action on this news was forged in the Directorate of Instruction. Fernando de Azevedo also accompanied the opposition that was made there, invariably responding to it with denials, censorship and counter-information. Thus, the statements of the General Directorate of Public Instruction were distributed over Jornal do Brasil, Vanguarda, A Pátria, A Manhã, O Brasil, Correio da Manhã, A Noite and Jornal do Commercio as a domain of reinscription, conversion or adaptation of the criticism of others.

Invention of subterfuges and artifices of administrative action

The records of administrative action in public education of the federal capital in the decade and a half that separates the appointment of Carneiro Leão and the exoneration of Anísio Teixeira, above all, inform about the ways of deciding and the practices of power in a division of the City Hall. Despite the differences that appear as this documentation is compared, there is in the means used and in the solutions found to organize the command a constant capacity to redefine administrative strategies in relation to the obstacles encountered. In this sense, the insistence with which historiography has recently distinguished the Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira reforms also warns about how they circumvented confrontations and oppositions. As suggested by the researches of Maria Cristina ^{Zentgraf (1994)}, Sandra ^{Mendonça (1997)} and Josie ^{Silva (2006)}, Carneiro Leão did not count on the support that Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira had from the mayor's office. Nevertheless, he reorganized the internal routine of the General Directorate of Instruction, reformed the process of teacher promotion by merit, implemented school tests, organized the teaching of physical education, and expanded the services of school assistance. Fernando de Azevedo was able to approve his project of reform in the Municipal Council, having, however, to give up the unification of the teaching classes that he initially proposed. Nevertheless, he did not fail to determine the classification for promotion by merit in the teaching career. The significant attention of historiography by the Fernando de Azevedo administration of the Directorate of Instruction of the Federal District brings together analyses of the specificity of the personnel policy, of the school buildings plan, and the political commitments network that were then developed and suggests the ways power was exercised. The extent and scope of the institutional reform that Anísio Teixeira promoted in the Department of Education led to studies about both the strong political opposition then suffered and the fierce resistance on the part of the staff of the educational administration itself. Somehow, all those who sought to study the education reforms in the federal capital of the 1920s and 1930s showed that there was an important series of accomplishments between setbacks and ideals.

The analysis of administrative sources reminds that the command works with very permanent and effective models of organization in the control of tasks. Despite the creation of new divisions and services in the period, the dispatch of official letters, ordinary instructions, the protocol, call notices, minutes, and announcements predominated as a way of establishing routines and clarifying or recording decisions. Although in this way, the method of controlling the flow of these documents and guaranteeing their efficiency seems to have been strategic action to discriminate functions and define competences and attributions. Regarding solutions of power reorganization in the division that Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira successively commanded between 1922 and 1935, what can be perceived is how much subterfuge and artifice there is. Without even seeing his education reform project forward, Carneiro Leão had organized a digest of laws, compiling whatever there was of legislation on public education of the capital for its use. A palliative that Fernando de ^{Azevedo (1929)} used to justify the need to approve an articulated and harmonious” education code. Successfully having it approved in 1928 does not explain Azevedo's performance in the Directorate of Instruction. Most of all, the study of call notices and communiqués of the time indicates the concentration of power that the implementation of the education reform sought to guarantee to the office of the director of instruction. With the restructuring of the Department of Education between 1932 and 1933, Anísio Teixeira puts the actions of command in other bases, creating a well-individualized set of specialized organs. More decisive, perhaps, was how he maneuvered to create and make socially acceptable the new arrangements and their functional frameworks. ^{Teixeira (1935}, p. 103) did not act at once, from a proposal for integral reform developed “in the throes of logic and doctrine”. He decided to develop partial initiatives aimed first at the immediate demands because, according to him, the teaching itself in the Federal District was “profoundly unequal in material and personal conditions.” The series of instructions that follow thereof, just like the communiqués and the instruction digest, express something of the repairs and adjustments deemed necessary for proper understanding or even the exercise of command.

The Digest of Instruction ordered by Carneiro Leão between 1924 and 1925 was an attempt to give order and agility to the consultation of teaching legislation. It seems to have been an expedient whose purpose was to certify the administration of the legality of its initiatives, a way of referencing the decisions and making the director of public instruction take possession of the post. According to ^{Carneiro Leão (1926}, p. 201), without a Digest of Instruction it would be impossible “for the administrator himself to have at hand always, at precise moments, all that, in matters of law, exists on certain questions, or certain points in the life of municipal education”. Thus, the effort that has resulted in the compilation and classification of existing teaching laws is also a means of exercising authority. Most of all, it avoided “having to resort to the knowledge of certain officials, collectors of newspapers clips and masters of enviable memory” (^{Carneiro Leão, 1926}, p. 201). From this perspective, it is understood that legislation was certainly not the only power instrument at stake in public administration. Taking hold and exercising authority, for instance, constituted other ways of exercising command that justified the use of very diversified strategies of control and power.

Through the notices issued between 1927 and 1930 by the Office of the General Directorate of Public Instruction, we see that Fernando de Azevedo not only operated a new personnel policy but centralized actions previously distributed by other boards. On the one hand, Paschoal ^{Lemme's (1984}, pp. 36-37) testimony on the contracting regime determined by the contest calls for the positions that the education reform created in 1928 indicates a persistent resistance to the bargaining policy of appointments. Nelson ^{Piletti (1982}, p. 204) clarifies that these contests were held as “an attempt to discipline a sector hitherto dependent on circumstantial factors”. In practice, the contests served as an instrument to give a more technical character to posts in education and wont to achieve the objectives of reform. On the other hand, the replacement of the call notice for the construction of four primary schools in 1928 reveals something of the centralization maneuvers organized in the General Directorate of Public Instruction. Severely criticized by the press, which accused the inconvenience of plans and projects being exclusively judged by instructional technicians, the call was suspended to reappear two months later, already incorporating three engineers from the Directorate General of Works and Traffic, a division traditionally in charge of this type of bidding (^{Paulilo, 2007}, p. 247-248). Likewise, the reorganization of a private warehouse of public instruction and the creation of a school clinic consolidated maneuvers to centralize decisions and initiatives regarding the administration of education in the General Directorate of Instruction itself, giving it greater autonomy.

The restructuring of the General Directorate of Public Instruction that Anísio Teixeira concluded between 1932 and 1935 not only accentuated this strategy but also specialized the attributions of the central administration of education. According to Clarice ^{Nunes (2000}, pp. 237-239), the reform of that time created a network of services to act on the fragmentation of the capital's school system, which, woven by advisory and executive bodies, produced an “eloquent ideologizing effort.” In particular, her research clarifies that the momentum of this effort to organize and accomplish sought in school legislation conditions to institutionalize itself. Expressing a thorough rationalizing work, the copious school legislation produced in the period was associated with the legalistic-bureaucratic tradition of the exercise of power in Brazil by interpretations concerned with unveiling the reform practices of the reformer's thinking. Studies of the work of producing laws, norms, and regulations in Anísio Teixeira’s office have shown that frequent modifications of decrees, successive publication of normative instructions, and revocations suggest the capacity to respond to resistances, to deal with unforeseen difficulties and to maneuver. Clarice ^{Nunes (2000}, p.396) herself warns about the intimate relationship between legal formulas and conflicting interests in Anísio's manner of leading the reform of the teaching department of the federal capital. In this sense, the codifying effort of the teaching administration and its oscillations and retreats that normative instructions and revocations accuse turns out to be a field and an object of struggle in the power relations implicit in the social movement as a whole.

Operating on the law, maneuvering to strengthen the municipal division of public education, and acting to have authority to decide were common features to the exercise of command by Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira. Despite differences in the doings, these are solutions with striking similarities. There are others already well understood by historiography. Thus, making experience through propaganda of ideas, acting directly on teacher education and work, appointing and assigning constituted practices that could still be pointed out inasmuch as they are well studied. However, it is worth insisting a little more on the specificity of the strategies used in each new administrative period to deal with resistance and difficulties of their own. The reflection on peculiarities of the organization of actions in the General Directorate of Instruction of the capital between 1922 and 1935 leads to interesting problems, which bring up the challenges of making a history of practices. In this regard, Michel de ^{Certeau’s (1994)} concept of strategy is a useful analytical contribution. In the emphasis given to administrative maneuvers, the idea that actions that capitalize conquered advantages, prepare future expansions and thus obtain autonomy in relation to the variability of circumstances (^{Certeau, 1994}, p. 99) are strategic imparts some insight to efforts of understanding the functioning of the Directorate of Instruction of the Federal District.

In particular, Certeau assists in the study of this type of procedure with fundamental warnings involving the reach of force and power relations constituted by strategies. In his view, it is central to identify the uses, appropriation, and especially reuse of the models of conduct imposed on people by institutions. In the terms in which he thought, the emphasis on subjects’ artifices and subterfuges of movement in a system of power and control makes it possible to glimpse skillful uses of official meanings, sometimes advantageous, and partly subversive. From this perspective, any approach to procedures of power over others improves the accuracy of its conclusions if it retains Certeau's way of thinking everyday practices.

With this in view, other sources serve to circumscribe the organization of actions and reforms of teaching in the Directorate of Public Instruction of the period. The reports and memories are especially interesting. By means of this type of record, we got good accounts of the everyday work in the division of the city hall responsible for the administration of education. An important part of what is known about Carneiro Leão's difficulties in dealing with the political environment of the capital comes from his own testimony. A report published in 1926 by the director of education himself to “declare the reasons for the impossibility of certain plans, or achievements” (^{Carneiro Leão, 1926}, p 6), Teaching in the capital of Brazil is the reference that best supports the analyses of budgetary troubles, institutional precariousness, and the successes of the initiatives of his administration. The impracticability of submitting a reform project to city mayors, the support obtained from teachers, the articulations to arrange physical education demonstrations, to rehearse school tests, and to organize training courses for teachers already in office are events that are not analyzed without a clear reference to the report published by Carneiro Leão. Through it, Josie ^{Silva (2006)}, Soomaa ^{Silva (2009)}, Sandra ^{Mendonça (1997)} and Maria Cristina Zentgraff (1994) understood, among other things, measures to alleviate financial hardships, to make public festivities feasible, and to persuade about active methods of education. Likewise, in the Memoirs that Paschoal Lemme published in four volumes, he reserved for the period in which he worked on the Directorate of Instruction a significant testimony of its backstage. Especially what he discloses about his office hours and work environment, his cases and anecdotes, gives a lively impression of the way interpersonal relationships took place and allowed to act. Fernando de ^{Azevedo's (1971)} autobiography itself is a version of the backstage events that should be taken into account when determining the conditions under which reform maneuvers occurred between 1927 and 1930.

The periodical press and printed matter also set out action strategies that are important to understand. Both by the pedagogical models they put into circulation and by the means through which they disseminated and imposed certain appropriations of reform initiatives, this type of source was carefully studied by a historiography interested in devices for introduction of new teaching practices during the effort of renewal of public teaching in the 1920s and 1930s. On printed matter, especially Diana ^{Vidal (1992)}, Marta Carvalho and Maria Rita de Almeida Toledo (2000) showed the role that the Public Education Bulletin had in Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira’s reform strategies between 1927 and 1935. Following her research conclusions, it is perceived that whether by the themes and problems put in focus or by the system of references built or the articulations it made with other institutions of the Directorate of Instruction, this publication not only contributed to the implantation of a pedagogical culture considered modern but also raised a good part of the employees of both administrations to the condition of technical authority. But the main vestiges of the maneuvers that the reforms of education realized in the period seem to be in the periodical press. As witnessed by Nelson ^{Piletti’s (1982}; ¹⁹⁹⁴) studies about the Fernando de Azevedo reform, the daily press news is a source that allows to deal with the controversy and the topics that the central administration did not treat in its official organs. Thus, for example, the troubled process of the reform project, its embarrassments, the provisional alliances that enabled its approval, and the personnel policy of the period were perceived and described by ^{Piletti (1982)} from the systematic reading of newspaper news of the capital. Subsequently, interested in the relation of the press with the Fernando de Azevedo reform, Sooma Silva (1999, 2001) returned to the news studied by Piletti to understand the language used. He attended to “the rules of enunciation shared by the media” and found a practice of journalistic production central to the political legitimacy of the teaching reform (^{Paulilo et al., 1999}). To some extent, warns ^{Silva (2001)}, the confusion between the expectations of carrying out reform and the ideals of teaching restructuring made Fernando de Azevedo’s initiative be considered a driving force for change. In the approach to these types of sources, the use of press and print to involve public opinion is noteworthy. As instruments of communication and persuasion, interviews, surveys, reports and opinion articles also show to be a part of educational policy.

As a last example that I will deal with here, correspondences are equally useful sources for circumscribing the educational reform maneuvers in the Directorate of Public Instruction of the federal capital in the 1920s and 1930s. Different studies and publications remind us that some of the political support and solidarity were built externally to the Directorate of Instruction. The frequent correspondence between Fernando de Azevedo, Lourenço Filho and Anísio Teixeira shows it well. Between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro an articulation was established that would lead Lourenço Filho to the Federal District first as a lecturer and later as director of the Institute of Education and would keep Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira still close. Pedro ^{Pagni (2000)} even proposes that this closeness, despite its idiosyncrasies, allowed to consolidate a pedagogical knowledge to be disseminated to educators and to guide their practices. On the other hand, there are movements that were more internal, between collaborators, such as shown by Maria Luiza Pena's (1987) --- (^{PENNA, 1987}) compilation when gathering Azevedo's correspondence with Venâncio Filho, Frota Pessoa, Paschoal Lemme and Anísio Teixeira, but also of teachers and employees, to stay in the two examples brought by ^{Nunes (2000}, p.393). The common aspirations testified by the correspondence in one case and the willingness to participate or appeal the administrative decisions expressed in another are worth as a reference to the study of the sociability networks then constituted and their turbulence. Part of the retreats and changes in course, the compromises, and the dynamism of conveniences in the period of educational reforms have been elucidated by analyses that delve into correspondences. Thus, for Pedro ^{Pagni (2000)} to discuss the disputes between renovators, for Marta ^{Carvalho (2004)} to understand the political limits imposed on the reforms, for ^{Nunes (2000)} to discuss the occupation of certain positions and how privileges were obtained, or for Ana Maria ^{Magaldi (2003)} to address the 1932 Manifesto signatories' inquiries into the gesture of the group involved, it was essential to resort to this type of source. Above all, these are incursions that reveal significant aspects of the strategies to amalgamate and consolidate positions regarding the provisional character of alliances, the limits of actions, the conflicts of interest and the differences of understanding present in the implementation of public education reforms in the federal capital at the turn of the 1920s to the 1930s.

Final considerations

The use of these different types of sources improves the understanding of the strategies of teaching administration at the time, allowing to question the results of education reforms also from the point of view of the organization of command and its exercise. The study of testimonies, the press and correspondence not only allows to qualify the processes of formalization of teaching administration practices. Most of all, it shows that command is managed from a place susceptible to being circumscribed and appropriated, exposed to the blows of cunning, to the sleight of hand, of those who escape it. In this sense, the investigation of the devices designed to achieve certain results and the instruments designed or adjusted to anchor a given strategy, is linked in more than one way to the understanding of the kind of organization that could then be obtained for them to function. Of all the material that is usually used in such analyses, school legislation is the one that brings together the main indications of the administration’s complicity with the ordering, control and formalization of practices for public education. However, the way in which education was managed in the decade and a half that separates Carneiro Leão's taking over as general Director of Education of the Federal District to Anísio's exoneration from the Department of Education of the City Hall of the capital left, in the personal records and in news of the press, the vestiges of the several obstacles to be avoided in the insistent attempts to control the educative practice.

Including this type of sources in the study of public education reforms is useful to provide a general sampling of the actions that could be taken to consolidate a model of population management in the school. And thus also try to understand the responses to circumstances and choices of such procedures and such instruments, rather than others. Mainly because the survival of records on the trivial of educational administration and the many insightful remarks they contain, contribute to unraveling the interstices of the reformist enterprise of those years in the public education of the federal capital.

In the hypothesis that the administrative means of control and power of public education are not only made of structures and rules of organization, to disentangle some statements of the period, as Vidal suggests (1998, 76), makes it easier to understand how “the speech of continuity, in the administrative doing, assumed the character of difference.” Although with an articulated discourse on common themes, Fernando de Azevedo’s and Anísio Teixeira's ways of thinking about the school, the means of teaching and the formation of teachers differed, resulting in unique reform initiatives. Other studies show that it was not different with Carneiro Leão. Each of these reformers cultivated a style of dealing with education and, above all, of acting in the General Directorate of Public Instruction. From this perspective, recent historiography on these reforms has explored aspects of their actions that previously subsumed into a comprehensive understanding of the educational renewal movement. Thus, the actions of Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira on the teaching career and its specialization, the spaces and temporalities of the school, the public opinion and on their own offices already gather sufficiently careful studies to consider the differences between them. It turns out that, as enlightening as they may be, such analyses may give the impression that reform initiatives and their maneuvers depend exclusively on a conscientious exercise of command.

Of course, it is risky, as the studies of Foucault and Certeau warn, to treat power and the organization of its devices as if they were someone’s property or privilege. Both the series of procedures that ^{Foucault (2003)} analyzes as motives of political action and the practices that ^{Certeau (1994)} takes as strategies prevent the existence of actions not only capable of articulating a set of physical places where power is distributed, but also serve many different interests and multiple combats. Above all, they are approaches that, in order to understand something of the most ordinary disputes of everyday life, put the exercise of power and command in relation to what escapes and resists. Thinking, as Nunes suggests (2000, p.393), the direction of public instruction as a practice subject to such relationships implies risking “to elucidate ... the struggles to maintain or interfere with the power to legislate.” In this order of preoccupations, more than inventorying the instruments and the uses of command, it matters to understand how one decides, when one hesitates, and the circumstances of confrontations. The main purpose of this article is to indicate the series of vestiges that several of the testimonies of the time, the periodical press and the correspondences bring in this sense and that can also be found in the legislation itself and in the administrative sources. I wanted to suggest that in their reform projects, Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira acted amidst a network of relationships always in activity and capable of precipitating or embarrassing a decision, support or detain an action and, therefore, produce somewhat unforeseen effects. Benefited by a perspective of analysis especially sensitive to the dynamism of this process, the approach sought to consider something of the relations between education administrators and sectors of public functionaries, groups of political opposition and popular demands, documented in the coeval sources.

Notwithstanding the relevance of the multiple confrontations, supports and resistances and obstacles to be overcome for the historical understanding of the reformist advent in the education of the 1920s and 1930s, the scope acquired by Carneiro Leão, Fernando de Azevedo and Anísio Teixeira demands reflection. To study their administrations today has been to perceive the singularities of the managements, designed or adjusted, to reorganize public education. Indeed, historiography shows that there are maneuvers in the education reforms in the federal capital that have supported very specific strategies of action and control. They do not deal directly with administrative issues but provide a fundamental analytical perspective for understanding the way public reform was carried out, sensitive, on the one hand, to the outlines of the new school practices and knowledge and, on the other, to the new terms of politicization of the educational field. Thus, they advanced substantially in the approach to the subterfuges and artifices of administrative action, reiterating the importance of leaders and showing how their discourses materialized in daily practices. From this angle, the interpretative potential of the analyses of Michel de Certeau and Michel de Foucault was explored in the field of historiography of education in studies that tried to connect modeling strategies and tactics of subversion. Above all, the mapping of control and discipline devices disseminated in schools was favored. However, this effort also provided indices for understanding the relations of force that defined the networks in which the practices were inscribed. By focusing on statistics, school subjects, pedagogical forms, ways of appropriation, or maneuvers in the educational movement, research in the area has renewed the importance of studying particular cases, whether of individuals, institutions or reforms.

This story cannot be explained by the lives of the characters or institutions they created, and in fact has no interest in the reforms themselves, but in the problems they pose. The practical efficacy of the appropriations that were then used to shape a project of social domination, as suggested by Marta Carvalho's research, was full perception of consequence for a better understanding of the new school in the country. The emphasis on the representations through which the agents and mechanisms of domination and control unique to the school were recognized has made one think the exercise of power in accordance with a relational model. Also the study of everyday school practices has altered the understanding of the history of education. Previously viewed as a form of history of ideas, it is now more concerned with the meaning of activities such as publishing, organizing school time and space, and school-based medical inspection or use of books, manuals, and notebooks. Finally, see the school as a place of socially and historically produced conflict and consensus, placing it at the heart of social tensions, as Vidal's research aims, precludes a categorical definition of the term reform. On the contrary, it allows the reformist advent to be treated in part from the relations that produced it and from those it was itself capable of producing, or, as Thomas ^{Popkewitz (1997)} suggests, according to the bonds it establishes between individuals and problems of government. Although such notions help to think about the transformations under way in educational services in the 1920s and 1930s, there are issues regarding the exercise of command that are somewhat neglected in the study of reforms of that time. As I have tried to show in this article, the discussion of the relations between leaders of teaching and what was being administered is conceptually little refined. From what was managed to enable the command in the General Directorate of Instruction of the Federal District during the education reform undertakings, problems prevail. Understanding the way in which the command was structurally constituted without losing sight that its meanings were weaving themselves according to conjunctures and individual performances is one of them. Another example is expressed in the difficulties of interpretation of the slippery relations between what the educational reforms sought to impose and what was their reception, or between the formalities of political-administrative practices and the subterfuges of daily practice. In this sense, both combining micro-approaches to middle- and long-term studies, as well as asking which resistances were operated and which appropriations were made by the various school persons of the models that were imposed on them still open up good sources of work on the political history of educational reforms.