Introduction

The State of Pará presented to the instituted republican country the first teaching regulation, through Decree no. 149 of May 7, 1890 (Pará, 1890). With it, the Pará primary mixed school underwent changes in its organization. During the first republican decade, the mixed school was also reconfigured, initially maintaining reservations and contradictions, and then becoming more expressive in society, which pointed to a discontinuation of the historical process. Not only the school organization, but also the subjects were resized in the educational scenario.

The first decade of the republican mixed school was permeated by ambiguities present in the speeches and actions that, in one moment was denied, in another, it was assumed as a possibility in education. This can be seen by the refusal of the public authorities in relation to this type of school, in the opposite movement, by the population's demand for schooling and, also, by the resizing of daily relations between men and women. After assuming power, the republican government took over the discourse of the modern, associated with the idea of progress and change. In a contradictory way, when it comes to the controversial theme of coeducation of the sexes and the mixed school, it remained reticent at first and then re-inserted it as a school practice.

In an attempt to address these contradictions, the aim of this study is to present the intricacies of inserting the mixed school in the Pará republican project, problematizing its inaccuracies in relation to the joining of girls and boys at the same time and school space, pointing out moments of refusal , in its early years, in isolated schools, to then expand and reach school groups. In this path, the role of women - teachers and students - in the permanence of the mixed school in Pará stands out. For that, signs of the colliding movements in the assembly of the mixed school are sought, privileged present in government documents - such as Decrees, Ordinances - and in the magazine A Escola.

It is clear that, from an economic and social point of view, the institution of the republican regime in Pará did not bring ruptures to the society of Pará, as the economic and social structures remained almost intact. However, the educational project was reordered, and with it the practices from the mixed school, bringing together boys and girls in the same school environment, they changed, and with the effective participation of women in teaching, they moved from isolated schools to school groups.

1. The Republican School of the Early Years

As an expressive sign of the commitment to modernize education, the Pará school was redesigned under the framework of republicanism. Once the Confederate State of Pará was organized, the goal of bringing it closer to the country's large urban centers required many tasks, among them, and most notably, was to erect the ideas of order and progress through education. Republican intellectuals proposed to bring significant changes to the educational project in Pará and it was with the effective adherence to this regime that the alliance was realized at least in the prescriptions. One of the impulses of this project would be the need for “[...] the formation of a cohesive elite of doctors, who would put themselves at the forefront of public affairs and the construction of the power of a nascent Republican State” (^{SARGES, 2010}, p. 82).

In the same way that urbanization was a milestone in the distance from the imperial past, education also lent itself to this service. The critical discourse undertaken by republicans, in relation to the actions of the imperial government in the educational field, publicly characterized the imperial school as wicked and disorganized, therefore, replaceable by a new project. The lines in this direction spanned the first republican decades. Professor Marianna Vianna, in her teaching report, published in the magazine “A Escola”, declares her perception of the qualities undertaken in education by the republican project:

It is necessary to consider that seven years ago, when the Republic was proclaimed, primary education was in the most deplorable state, [...] It is necessary to consider the absolute muteness in which the Pará school lived, and we will then be able to assess the degree of development of this important branch of public affairs (Revista a Escola, 1901a, p. 20).

This idea was articulated in the speeches and practices that emerged since the first republican years. ^{Veríssimo (1891}), an eminent intellectual from Pará, contributed greatly to the implementation of education as a privileged public policy in the government. His speech pointed to the attempt to consolidate the idea of education as the central axis of the project to modernize society, as can be seen in this excerpt:

Whatever the differences of school, about the methods, the systems, the organization, the degree of effectiveness, the mode of distribution of public education, the right, the indisputable, the definitive is that national prosperity cannot rest on another basis than public instruction (^{Veríssimo, 1891}, p. 8).

The early years of republican education refer to changes in state guidelines, especially in relation to the reorganization of public education at its various levels. In 1890, under the government of Justo Leite Chermont, and even before the Para Constitution was promulgated, public instruction obtained specific regulations. José Veríssimo being in charge of the General Directorate of Public Instruction, he was able to transform his ideas for the educational formation of the popular classes into an official discourse. With the justification that education was until the end of the empire governed “by confusing, contradictory and mutilated legislation by partial and incomplete reforms carried out without plan and without order”, the Regulation of Public Instruction and Special Education of the State of Pará was made effective, by Decree 149, of May 7, 1890 (Pará, 1890). On this basis, it was decreed that:

Public education in the Confederate State of Pará comprises: Primary education. High school. Professional or technical education.

Primary education is given: In elementary schools. In primary schools. At the Amparo school. At the Pará Institute of students and craftsmen. At night schools for adults or other establishments that, by their nature and category, distribute the teaching so called in this regulation.

Secondary education is given: At Lyceu Paraense in a preparatory course required for enrollment in higher education courses in the Republic. In normal schools for the training of teachers of both sexes [...] (Pará, 1890, not paginated).

Specifically, in relation to primary education, the division was foreseen in elementary schools and popular schools. Elementary schools would be installed in small towns, with less than 80 students, expected duration of at least three years of course and functioning in 4 hours of class in the morning shift. Popular schools had a full primary school (elementary, middle and higher) in six years; they are classified in schools of first [parishes and villages], second [cities] and third entrance [capital], with frequency of at least 80 children of school age and, with that, a school for each sex would be created, with functioning in 3 and a half hours in the morning shift, 2 hours in the afternoon (Pará, 1890).

Without defined principles in relation to secular education, mandatory or free education, the document indicated the appreciation of the centralization of state power. The autonomy of the State in relation to the Church was dimensioned in the year following the reform, under the terms of the Constitution of the State of Pará, of June 22, 1891, which established the secularity of the teaching given in public establishments (Pará, 1891).

Regarding the reformist movement of Brazilian republican education, the State of Pará took the lead in the promulgation of its teaching guiding document, which gives it a pioneering role in the directive actions for education in Brazil. The May 1890 Regulation was the watershed between the imperial and the republican project for education in Pará.

Despite the anticipation of this reform in relation to those undertaken in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the marks in national education were printed by the documents prepared in these large urban centers, which control political and economic power and, therefore, are apt to spread ideas. The Reform of Benjamim Constant, from the Federal District (Rio de Janeiro), instituted by Decree 981, of 8 November 1890 and the Reform of Caetano de Campos de São Paulo, by Decree of 8 September 1892, were noted as model for republican education. The first is highlighted by the establishment of gratuity, by the secularity of education, by the distribution of primary education in two degrees and by the maintenance of separate schools for boys and girls; the second was notable for the adoption of model schools and school groups, which also maintained the separation of the sexes (^{Carvalho, 2003}; ^{Veiga, 2007}). Both were aligned with the republican ideals that consolidated the foundations of the Brazilian republican school.

This variety of experiences was possible as a result of federative decentralization that made it possible for original pedagogical projects to emerge in each state. This idea was consolidated by the Brazilian Constitution of 1891. It was determined that only higher education was the responsibility of the federal government, with the remaining levels of education being managed by the Secretaries of Interior of each state, maintaining the autonomy of the federative units. The most effective concern with the construction of a national project began in 1930, with the creation of the Ministry of Education and Health, during the government of Getúlio Vargas (^{Veiga, 2007}). Until then, the value of a national education was being engendered by Brazilian intellectuals. It is worth highlighting the venture of the Paraense José Veríssimo who, in 1890, published in Pará the first edition of his book “A Educação Nacional”, presenting strategic arguments for, with the education of typical traits of our culture, building a national feeling (Veríssimo, 1906).

Driven by the intention to build a national identity, the reforms of republican public education were guided, each in its own way, by the educational model that impressed the establishment of the limits of primary education, or its division and regulation, the introduction of professional instruction in teaching primary education, national and civic education for children, assistance to poor students, compulsory and free primary education, school hygiene and construction of school buildings (Thomaz Neto & Braga, 2002).

At the end of the first republican decade, and this time under the influence of the São Paulo educational model, primary education in Pará was again reorganized, this time, by Decree 625, of January 2, 1899, which instituted the General Regulation of Primary Education, the which established that public education should be free, lay and uniform, and would be taught in isolated schools, in the places:

where there are more than 20 children in case they receive the instruction; in model schools attached to the Escola Normal, intended not only for primary education but also for the practical exercises of teaching the master students [...] (Pará, 1899a, not paginated).

The isolated public schools were divided into elementary schools (where there were more than twenty children able to receive instruction) and complementary schools (where there were at least fifty children for each class), divided into two courses: high school and high school, each lasting two years (PARÁ, 1899a). With it, primary education would also occur in school groups.

In addition to the formality of laws, intellectuals, higher education graduates, high school university lenses, regular teachers and teachers, high school students, recorded their opinions and ideas in magazines, newspapers, reports and others. Several speeches marked an era, formed generations and revealed conjunctions, tensions and conflicts of opinions and practices that helped to constitute educational universes. In a scenario that had the adhesion of Pará to the proclamation of the Republic as a backdrop, men and women experienced, projected, discussed, and again experienced schooling. It was in this environment that the Republic of Pará remade the mixed school.

2. A faltering step from mixed schools to isolated primary schools

The inaccuracies of the republican mixed school, between 1890-1901, when it spreads throughout the state, including school groups, are manifestations of the contradictions between the discourse based on modernization and conservative practices in relation to this type of school, which it is faced with the incisive presence of teachers in the conduct of teaching and with equity between the sexes in the discourse.

Decree no. 149, of May 7, 1890 inhibited the practice of mixed schools, pointing, in some speeches, to a kind of return to the standards prior to its institutionalization made in 1880. In this document, the mixed school was not prescribed, having only been regulated. female and male schools. Not ignoring the existence and the possibility of the promiscuity of the sexes, the recourse for their regular inclusion throughout the state was provided through their permission, indicated only in the case of the inclusion of boys in female schools. This indication kept the union of the sexes in the primary school exclusively to teachers, in the same way as in the indications for mixed schools. Mixed classrooms were allowed to be introduced in all elementary schools; in popular schools it was restricted to the first four years of elementary and high school, excluding the last two years of higher education. In both, the age limit imposed on boys remained in the ten years, in dialogue with the Opinion of Rui Babosa, from 1882, in which the co-education of the sexes was foreseen with this limit (Pará, 1890).

José Veríssimo (1981), in his management report, before the Directorate of Public Instruction of Pará, once again presented the dazed treatment that the mixed school received. It showed the statistics of primary schools: in 1891, the number of public primary schools totaled 417, 276 for males, and 141 for females (Veríssimo, 1891). As can be seen, mixed schools were excluded from the numbers and the public.

Despite not being included in statistics and legislation, mixed schools remained in Pará school life. There is an indication that, from the year 1892 and throughout the decade, the republican government of Pará expanded public education with mixed schools. This may have occurred either because of the change in the state government, or because of social practices.

It is visible the numerical expression that the mixed school was gaining - mainly from the middle of this decade - in the process of expansion of primary public education in the republican Pará, in relation to the two previous decades². However, it is necessary to consider some singularities in this process.

It is noted that a considerable number of these schools have been extinct in some locations, which points to their institutional weakness, which may result either from fluctuating demands, or from the refusal of this model and predilection for unisexual schools.

It is also noticeable that its creation in several locations originated from existing schools, male or female, which, in these cases, did not contribute to the numerical expansion of the number of public schools, but generated a differential in school composition, in the localities. where it happened. The conversion of unisexual to mixed schools seems to be a symptom of the disruption of a school pattern.

School conversions also present an exciting situation. They suggest, on the one hand, the permanence of teachers in mixed teaching and, on the other hand, the expansion of girls' participation in men's schools. In Marapanim, the mixed school was converted from male, and remained governed by a teacher; that of Mututy, in Breves, and that of Baturité, in Macapá, were also converted from men's schools and, in the probable case that teachers were not replaced by teachers, the number of mixed schools run by teachers is added. These cases corrupt what was prescribed in the legislation of the period, which only provided female teaching for these schools - although it did not prohibit male teaching - which, once again, leaves a mark of the strength of educational practices subverting the established order.

Finally, its much greater numerical expansion in the interior of the state than in the capital means another indicator of the reluctance of the republican government to make mixed schools central in the organization of teaching. Being privileged to mark the presence of the public power throughout the state, they appear as a device, at the same time that they were subsumed in territories with less expressiveness than the capital.

At the end of that decade, the mixed school was once again a place of control and order. This occurred through Decree no. 625, of January 2, 1899, which established the possibility of creating mixed schools and integrated them into the organization of primary education (Pará, 1899a).

This document is significant because it indicates dissent in the institutionalization of this school, as well as the contradiction between the supposedly new and the traditional, in the educational field.

With a meaning of change in the educational structure, mixed schools would be characterized as those “art. 59 [...] in which children of both sexes can be admitted ”(Pará, 1899a), which slips towards the co-education of the sexes. However, the relationship of boys and girls at school was still subtly presented as a vector of morality, which should be avoided.

Still in this document, the restriction regarding the joining of the sexes in public primary school remained, in three ways:

The form of organization of boys and girls in the mixed school can also be explained as a reaction against it. With the possibility of the conjunction of the sexes in the same spaces, restrictions were imposed on the division of hours, separating girls in the morning shift and boys in the afternoon shift³, signaling a negative reaction in relation to the effectiveness of the promiscuity of the sexes, as it is possible to observe:

In mixed schools, instruction will be given promiscuously to boys and girls, in two daily sessions of three hours; - the first from 7 ½ to 10 ½ in the morning, for students, the second from 2 to 5 in the afternoon, for students [...] (Pará, 1899a).

Two peculiarities can be highlighted in this format. First, in order to fulfill the separation, the students of the mixed schools had their regular study time reduced by 1 hour compared to unisexual schools, which practiced 4 hours of study in the morning. Secondly, the division of the school into two shifts, in addition to imputing the double working day to the mixed school teachers, also added extra hours of work, without due remuneration.

This disparity did not go unnoticed. João Lemos published in the magazine “A Escola” his complaint about the overwork of the teacher “[...] who supposedly works six hours a day [...] not counting the monetary reward, which did not make any progress. ”(Revista a Escola, 1901b, p. 207). It is possible that complaints of this type led to a change in remuneration through legal means, which occurred in June of that year. After that, teachers' salaries were redone, which became higher in relation to the teachers of unisexual schools in schools of 3rd entrance, in the state capital, and 2nd entrance, in inner cities. In the elementary schools of 1st entry, in towns and parishes, inequality remained.

Following the upward movement in the creation of mixed schools, the end of the 19th century was also effervescent in the discussion about the reunion of girls and boys at school. In Brazil, associated with the concept of coeducation of the sexes - the mixed school has expanded as a topic of discussion at the national level. The magazine “A Escola”, promoting this debate, brought to the local domain the dimension that the theme had been taking. In 1900, the National Education Congress defined its theses, among them:

27th. Coeducation of the sexes in schools and primary education institutes.

29th. Organization of secondary education institutes for men.

39th. Coeducation of the sexes in secondary education institutes.

51st. Coeducation of the sexes in higher education institutes (Revista a Escola, 1900a, not paginated).

The discussion of the topic of coeducation of the sexes was followed by Pará, which proposed it as a thesis for the first meeting of the Pedagogical Congress, here restricted to primary and normal education (Revista a Escola, 1900c).

The consolidation of this type of school in the state can be seen in the school statistics of the year 1900, which counted among the 577 public primary schools, with 133 mixed, being 120 elementary and 13 complementary (^{Veríssimo, 1906}; Revista a Escola, 1900b).

Teachers appointed by the state government participated in these schools. If the upward movement in teacher education created conditions for the institutionalization of mixed schools - because they can only be governed by female teachers - in reverse, the upward creation of mixed schools also made it possible to expand the participation of women in public primary schools.

The participation of teachers in the mixed school, numerically ascending, is thought of as a practice of resistance. Appropriating the teaching discourse associated with motherhood, as a way of guaranteeing their survival and obtaining other powers in the field of work (^{FRAISSE; PERROT, 1994}a), the teachers occupied the space of teaching boys and girls. The representation of the teacher / mother, imputed to them by the male discourse was revealed as a mediating element between the interdictions and negotiations of the female teaching work, in addition to the times and places of women in education.

3. Insertion of the Mixed School in School Groups

School groups were created in connection with the Republican national project. Implemented in São Paulo in 1893 and extended to other states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this model of public school became one of the icons of the break with the imperial past, qualified as a place of hygiene, control and rationality pedagogical. They incorporated the principle of serial classes brought together under one direction, using modern teaching methods, articulated knowledge and circulated the republican educational project. Its implementation was configured as a practice and representation of the Brazilian nation, formed by an orderly and progressive society. Built as monumental allegories, their spatial organization translated their pedagogical function of teaching, leading behaviors and the interiorization of social representations (Faria Filho & Vidal, 2000, p. 25). The control of time - a value experienced by industrialized societies - also had the sense of naturalizing everywhere, the urban. Coupled with the teaching concept, school practices used this idea in the distribution of schedules and shifts. ^{Lopes (2006}, p. 5) better defines this sense:

Opposing the broad and cyclical time of agrarian conceptions, the new urban and bourgeois reality presupposes a new formation: linear time, work, discipline, beginning and end, hierarchy and order. Space and time will be reordered, in that sense, space and school time will be structured for this training.

Planned in a symmetrical order, with spaces for leisure, hygiene, studies and control of teaching work, school groups became the organizational nucleus of a new school culture, which was consolidated in the first decades of republican Brazil through the organization of new times, routines and guidelines that, as Júlia (2001, p. 15) teaches, allowed “the transmission of this knowledge and the incorporation of these behaviors, norms and practices, according to the desired purposes”. With this new culture incorporated into school groups “[...] the entire school space was converted into an educational, moralizing and civilizing environment” (^{Souza, 1998a}, p. 49).

In the State of Pará, school groups were institutionalized with the General Regulation of Primary Education of 1899. According to him, the installation could be carried out “in the school districts of the capital and in the headquarters of the municipalities, with the criterion of having at least four schools of both sexes, within the radius set for mandatory ”(Pará, 1899a); these characteristics allowed the Government to bring them together, making them work in one building. With the model schools' regime and method, school groups should hold a maximum of 300 students of each sex, in female and male sessions, with only one direction (Pará, 1899a).

As a result of this document, the first School Group was opened in the state, in the city of Alenquer, in 1899. These groups were numerically expanded in subsequent years, reaching 12 units in 1901. Contrary to what happened in São Paulo, where school groups they were created to serve the urban centers, as stated by ^{Souza (1998a}), in Pará the state government foresaw the creation in the capital, but, for an unjustified reason, privileged its installation in interior cities. In Belém, school groups began to live two years later, in 1901.

According to the document that originated them, their organization took place from the meeting of isolated schools, women and men already existing, from which it is assumed that the goal of expanding education was not central to the integration of school groups in communities; the desire to sustain the image of the school group as a representation of the republican government was present in the prescription.

The project for the construction of the “Grupo Escolar José Veríssimo” building is significant, as it serves as an indicator of how in Pará the modernization project of the republican school was conceived.

Following the planned order, the daily movement of students began with access to the school through the two gardens. At the entrance, the separation of the sexes was done. The path ran through a courtyard accessible to a single gatehouse that served as a checkpoint on both sides. After the first inspection at the entrance, the students' tour ended in the two study rooms opposite the two bathrooms. The teachers followed the same route until the end of the corridor, to settle down in their work offices, also divided by sex. For men and women who proceeded to the second floor, the same distribution of classrooms and bathrooms awaited them. With the same size as the space of the two teachers' rooms on the ground floor, the principal's office ended the course.

The symmetry between the 8 classrooms and the 8 bathrooms, present in this school group, strengthened the concept of hygiene that was one of the mainstays of the modernization project. The number of spaces for sanitation contrasts with the absence of collective spaces for studies, such as a library or museum, which shows that variations in mixed school practices occurred according to the educational project of each state, but without losing sight of the paulista model⁴.

It is clear that the first school groups in Pará maintained the principle of school organization based on the separation of girls and boys, which is also noticeable in the creation of the school group in the city of Alenquer:

Art. 1. Isolated, complementary and elementary public schools, created in the city of Alenquer, start to function jointly in the building [school group] for this purpose leased by the government [...]Art. 3. Classes will work in two separate sections - the female from 7 ½ to 11 ½ in the morning and the male from 1 to 5 in the afternoon (Pará, 1899b, not paginated).

Without an appropriate building to spatially separate female and male sections, the document predicted that the separation would be maintained at different times. Keeping two sections of operation, it guaranteed the permanence of girls and boys in the group, but with the gender dividing pattern. Therefore, the entire primary, elementary and complementary course of schools in the city was housed in the school group, in classes separated by sex. The document does not indicate how many schools should be added to the group, therefore, it is not possible to say whether gender equity was a principle maintained in this and other groups based on this format. But, it is clear that with the expansion of school groups with this configuration, mixed schools could only exist in isolated schools.

As a propagator of a new school culture, school groups harbored an old precept: sexual differences were references for the organization of the school. This was a brand that expanded throughout Brazil, applied to models from abroad, because until the end of the 19th century, this was the characteristic of the numerous schools built in Europe, as stated by ^{Mayeur (1994}).

The project for school groups in São Paulo was the trigger for this logic. They had the following characteristics:

Built symmetrically around a central courtyard, they offered different spaces for teaching boys and girls. To the formal division of the plant, a wall was sometimes added, rigidly moving away and avoiding communication between the two sides of the school. These buildings had different side entrances for the sexes. Despite being standardized in plan, the buildings assumed different characteristics, with the façades being altered. [...] The rigid division of the sexes, the precise indication of individual spaces in the classroom and the control of body movements at recess formed a gesture and motor economy that distinguished the schooled student from the child without school (^{Vidal & Faria Filho, 2005}, p. 25).

The separation of the sexes implanted in the São Paulo school groups installed and disseminated the equity of the right to education between girls and boys, since equal numbers of rooms were always provided for them. However, it prevented coeducation, as indicated by ^{Souza (1998b}, p. 47): "[...] the São Paulo, public and secular school did not dare to advance in relation to the prevailing moral standards in society". The reversal of this direction only occurred in 1902, when programs of integral education and of an encyclopedic character were provided for both sexes.

Very early on, the contradictions of this model were brought into the experience of Pará school groups. From 1901 onwards, the first mixed chairs were incorporated into the organization of some groups, concomitant with some school groups that remained in the previous format. The inauguration of the mixed classes in the Pará groups was made in the creation of the school group in the city of Óbidos, in the interior of Pará:

Five primary education chairs are created in the school group in the city of Óbidos, one being a mixed complement and two elementary in each section of the same group.

Art 4th. The classes in the chairs above will work in two different sections - the female from 7 ½ to 11 ½ in the morning and the male from 1 to 5 in the afternoon (Pará, 1901a, s / p.).

With the justification of "[...] that the practice has shown that complementary education in school groups in the cities of the interior could well be given in a mixed class, common to both sections, with savings for Thesouro" (Pará, 1901b , not paginated), in addition to standardizing school groups in the state, the mixed chairs were expanded by the state government to other locations.

Although the economic reason was striking in the logic of the state government in incorporating a mixed chair in school groups, other dimensions of this process may account for the contradiction of this proposal in relation to what was done in other Brazilian states. The conjunction of some factors, it is believed, induced this process.

On the one hand, there is the discourse of the government and intellectuals favorable to the modernization of education, based on the format of school groups, which mobilized the acceptance of this project. With her eyes focused on this experience already carried out abroad, Professor Mariana Vianna published her teaching report in the magazine A Escola, explaining about her positivity:

France, Germany, the United States, Hollanda, Belgium, Switzerland and England, divide primary studies into courses taught by special teachers for each of them, and group in large buildings where hygiene shines widely. large number of students and students. Great economic-pedagogical advantages emanate from this extremely useful school organization, the most perfect, rational and profitable that exists (Revista a Escola, 1901b, p. 20).

This and other speeches complained about the order and hygiene of the school environment and, mainly, for its expansion of the school organization, as desired, perfect and rational. Therefore, the evaluation included the option for school groups and, consequently, the end of isolated public schools.

On the other hand, the republican government has quantitatively expanded mixed schools across the state; in the year of creation of the school groups, these schools already had an expressive dimension in state education, which refers to their naturalization in society. It is presumed that the practice of mixed education has driven the introduction of mixed chairs into the groups, despite the fixity of the initial project in relation to the separation of the sexes.

As a result of these two factors, an operational issue is perceived. If the groups were designed to bring together all schools in the cities, and mixed ones were already part of the teaching organization, the growing movement of mixed schools already created should move towards these groups, even with the initial limit to complementary schools.

It is inferred, with these elements, that the economic reasons were important to justify the creation of complementary mixed schools, as a solution to the small demand for this course. However, it is argued again that the expansive presence of mixed schools run by teachers, was a major factor in the expansion of this type of teaching in school groups. For this argument, it is considered that the mixed complementary schools were created, mainly with the conversion of already created female schools, governed by teachers, as it is possible to observe in the table below:

So, if the school of both sexes run by teachers met a female demand for schooling and was a step in expanding the participation of girls in school; if the mixed school run by teachers consolidated the feminization of the teaching profession and, therefore, expanded their participation in the school, the mixed complementary school in the paraense school groups, in turn, crossed the logic of the woman's belonging in the school and represented a sign the naturalization, at first, the equity of the sexes and, later, the sharing, between men and women, of school spaces.

The non-spreading of the mixed school to all school groups in the state, as well as the incorporation of the mixed school only in the complementary elementary school chair, is a sign that the reticence in relation to the joining of girls and boys in the school remained, despite expansion through the state. This movement of refusal and approval expresses yet another dissent in the institutionalization process of the mixed school combined with the project of modernization of paraense education, this time through school groups, because the project of co-education of the sexes and that of school groups, despite making part of the national project, they clashed in school practice, sometimes radically, sometimes subtly.

Mixed classes started to configure the times and spaces of paraense school groups. The documents show that of the 12 school groups created, 10 incorporated the complementary mixed chairs; the exceptions were two school groups located in Belém.

This was an adverse movement to what happened in other Brazilian states, which were still reticent in relation to the incorporation of mixed schools in school groups. In São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, until at least 1902 the practice of sexual division in school groups remained. ^{Veiga (2007}) presents the description of these groups made by a Minas Gerais inspector that year, and this practice is perceived in it. About the Brás School Group, from São Paulo, the inspector noted that there are playgrounds for both sections. And praising the order, characteristic of these groups, highlighted:

Such is the disciplinary order observed in these institutes that, given the sign of recreation by the bell, the movement of departure is uniform, year by year, without the slightest danger of confusion or promiscuity of the sexes (^{Veiga, 2007}, p. 245).

Therefore, the expansion of the mixed school in the paraense school groups, it can be said, gained a singularity in the national scenario, for bringing together, even if ambiguously, both in relation to the organization of teaching, as well as the moral standards of the time.

Final considerations

With the insertion in the school groups and with the numerical expansion throughout the State of Pará, the mixed school consolidated itself as a reality in the Pará context. Society, with the intention of becoming modern, configured education as a place to settle this logic, in which the school based on coeducational principles was allied to this sense. The social and educational standards of the republican Pará were built in this perspective, also in an adjustment of the contradictory logic between the social representations of the feminine that disassociated women from the intellectual field and the world of work and the material needs driven by the new orders of ascending capitalism, which involved disputes to determine concepts, values and ways of doing school.

Republican mixed schools, with singularities and restrictions, consolidated the disruption of strict pedagogical, moral and professional standards, which resized and were resized by the places and actions of women. The ruptures that women made in the educational field broke with the mental and social structures of their time. The teachers who made the mixed school changed the format of the school, within a social structure historically sedimented by power relations between the sexes and the male domain.

Here, teachers and students are perceived as privileged subjects in the implementation of the mixed school. But, of course, they shared this doing, with other subjects in different places of power. It is clear that in the historical change made through this school, by bringing together the male and female worlds, with their differences, women had a fundamental role in the experience of co-education of the sexes, because with their demands for work and study they made the mixed school as a possible place in paraense education.