Introduction

The introductory citation of this paper, although being about a fictional story, could be perfectly misunderstood as being the real life in many schools today - it is not difficult to observe similar scenes to the one described by “the girl who learned to fly” and we affirm that based on our own day-by-day experiences as teachers and researchers in many schools. The deprivation of ludic practices, the immobilit, the disciplinarization through the body, in many school contexts, become more than customary actions - they become habit or something “within normality”.

The core question, in that case, seems to try an understanding of how, when and why such pedagogical practices which repress playfulness in school contexts gained power and we need to reflect on how it was built along decades of public schooling in Brazil. Our discussion stems from the presupposition that many repressive actions of the ludic, unfortunately, quite common in many institutions, are the result of historical impositions upon children.

On world literature, the interest for the history of childhood has been increasing. There are widely recognized works such as by ^{Kohan (2003}), ^{Gagnebin (2013}), Erikson (N/D), ^{Agamben (2014}) and the classic “Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life” by Philippe ^{Ariès (1978}). Kuhlmann Júnior (1998) relates the evolution of the human look over childhood with the emancipation of women and social changes that occurred, specially from the 19th century on.

Besides, another institution had an important role for the acknowledgment and the changes in paradigm concerning childhood: the school. Infant schooling implied to the development of many social actions, such as the creation of laws and statutes, the emergence of political and pedagogical ideologies, besides causing a transformation of family nuclei. We will get into more detail about those aspects of this study further up. (^{ARIÈS, 1978}; KUHLMANN JÚNIOR, 1998).

We intend, on this paper, to discuss about the influence that some historical events had on the views we still have that the child, in the school context, learns better through the disciplinarization of the body. Other discussions will also be relevant, such as the history of Brazilian childhood, the child as the nation’s future (especially from the 1890 decade on) and the profile in which this child would be shaped by the recently reformulated paulista public school in the context of the First Republic (1890 - 1930).

The History of the Brazilian childhood: first approaches

Despite ^{Ariès (1978}) work being widely criticized including, for example, the fact that his iconographic analysis is based solely on perceiving the bourgeois childhood from the 12th century on, in the European context and that such interpretations do not guarantee that the childhood has been as he expounds, it is possible to infer that the child did not have an active voice in the world society for a long time. Childhood, considered in the “ages of life” chronology as the first age of a man, was known by the term enfant which means “non-speaking”. The idea of childhood was directly related to subordination and one could only escape it when they no longer depended exclusively on adults for many things.

According to Airès (1978) as “ages of life” did not correspond to biological ages, nut were also directly related to social functions: the age of toys (in which children would play); the age of school (when boys learned how to read and girls learned how to spin); the age of love (in which young men and women participated of parties and promenades); the age of war (when boys learned how to handle guns and ride horses); and, finally, the sedentary age (in which the men of law, of science and of study became sage, studious old men).

Only around the 13th century the portraits of children began to be exhibited through religious themes, such as the baby Jesus, some saints and angels. From the 15h century on, new representations of childhood have emerged, such as the ones which appear on funerary effigies, for instance. And in that case, an interesting fact: most part of the deceased children were represented not on their own tombs or on their parents’ and relatives’ tombs, but on their teachers’ (^{ARIÈS, 1978}).

The general feeling of those times does not get even close to the current feelings. The common opinion was that one should not acknowledge in children “neither motion in the soul, nor a recognizable body shape” (^{ARIÈS, 1978}, p. 57). Children were só insignifcant that people would not even fear they could come back after death to haunt the living ones!

The adults were even entitled to “not to get attached” to any child who had been born under their roof. ^{Ribeiro (1997}) reminds us that, in this case, the child was despised or treated as a miniature adult.

Until the 17th century, in fact, the love for the children was not an obvious issue: it suffices to remember the Renaissance man Montaigne, who claims having lost “two or three children” at a tender age. Such father could not even remember how many children he had; and we should note that it is not about stillborn babies, but children who lived for one, two or three years. (^{RIBEIRO, 1997}, p. 102).

^{Ribeiro (1997}) also tells that in Middle Ages, the power was delegated to the governor, that is, to the superior figure of the patriarchal family. The father was in charge with the obligation of protecting the inferior - children and women were seen as disadvantaged, needy of a tutor and incapable of solving problems by themselves.

Among many issues which are important for this study, another that is worth mentioning is related to ludic activities. From historian Van Marle’s iconography, ^{Ariés (1978}) concludes that in the 17h and 18th centuries adult entertainment was the same as the children’s. Various Dutch paintings show this interaction portraying plays such as blind man’s bluff, games and circular dances, for instance, with the participation of people within all age ranges. Seasonal festivities were illustrated and it is possible to realize that both children and youngsters had an important role in their execution. Games and leisure represented, back then, much more than simple fun: it was about an opportunity society had to strengthen collective ties and even hold meetings.

However, earlier in the 15th century, the first indications that school education would follow a more disciplinarian and less ludic approach started to arise. Idealized buy the Church and with moral connotations, many of the first schools which emerged in Europe considered games as incontrollable activities. The fear of causing a commotion and to take the focus off moral education prohibited, in many moments, the practice of physical in the school environment (^{ARIÉS, 1978}).

Numerous leisure activities were restricted to some moments after tasks considered “important”, as intellectual activities, for example. There were the ones who advocated that the practice of physical activities was compared to manual and hard work, seen by many societies as heavy labour, done by lower and/or slave classes, being, thefefore, opposed to intellectual work. “Games only come after homework, and even then under reservations!” (^{ARIÉS, 1978}, p. 111), read the bull by the Cardinal Amboise de Montagu, in 1501.

Only from the 17th century on the game ceases to be seen as “harmful”by some educational institutions. One of the first groups to hold that view were the Jesuits who, under the influence of the Renaissance humanists, realized the educative possibilities of games in pedagogical practices. The priests then chose not to repress games, but rather include them officially in their teaching programs (^{ARIÈS, 1978}).

Through this positive diffusion of the games by Jesuits, a new feeling arose in the educational area: the adoption of games as a necessary evil in children’s education. On “Traité de l’éducation des enfants” from 1722 (^{ARIÉS, 1978}) we learn that the body needs “to shake” as it grows and in the end of the 18th century the justification to the inclusion of exercising games at schools was patriot, once they aided to prepare youngsters to war. “It was possible then to grasp the benefits that Physical Education could bring to military instruction” (ARIÉS, 1978, p, 113).

In Brazil, the Jesuits kept a missionary bond specially from the 16th century onward, a time when our country was a settlement of Portugal and, therefore, with much to be explored. Around here, besides the conversion of the “gentile”to the christian foundations, the teaching of the Brazilian children was one of the main concerns of the “Society of Jesus” priests since the beginnings of their mission in the Portuguese America (^{CHAMBOULEYRON, 2010}).

The “Society of Jesus” order essentially missionary and created in the beginning of the 16th century has turned into a “teaching order” in Brazil, something that already occurred in Europe. So, besides the conversion of people to Catholicism, priests of that order also worried about the children and saw in education na opportunity for the Church precepts to reach their parents.

In that contexto, children’s evangelization had become a way of making feasible a difficult conversion, since, as was written on the sequence of the same letter, from the boys one could expect many fruits, once they barly contradicted the Christian law. With the adults being more and more aloof, all the attention turned to their children, explained then brother José de Anchieta, to priests and brothers from Coimbra by the end of April 1557 (^{CHAMBOULEYRON, 2010}, p. 52).

Therefore, Brazilian children would also contribute to the building of aliances mainly between Christian priests and Indians. The boys, as well as building a new Christendom, would be taught in the Christian doctrine, learnig how to speak, read and write in Portuguese and that would affect somehow their parents.

The education provided by Jesuits, though, was not seen by society in general as something important to the colony at the time. Instruction to the production activities themselves did not require great intellectual effort, whether from its administration’s point of view, whether from its workforce’s. (^{ROMANELLI, 2010}). Thus, the teaching was marginalized and seen as something with no necessary practical use to the advancement of the rudimentary production, considered as very important at the time.

The Jesuits maintained themselves for a long time in that process of “religious teaching”, because they also had another goal: the recruitment of faithful Christianity servers. (^{ROMANELLI, 2010}). Education not only was offered to the “curumins” but also to settlers’ children, hence promoting a maintenance of faith. It was exactly considering young priests’ recruitment that the first schools were founded, where Human Sciences, Languages and Theology began to be taught. From those schools emerged most part of the Order new priests.

Even with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, the model implemented by them still lasted for some time. Between the leaving of the religious from the educational sphere and the first measures to be taken related to how education in Brazil would be approached, from that moment onward, more than thirteen years passed. There was a disruption in the teaching structure and several modifications, among them the implementation of isolated subjects and the introduction of lay people in teaching, which started to be managed from that momento n by the State. But according to ^{Romanelli (2010}), despite several attempts there were not major changes in the educational system, for it later remained having the same literary and religious ambitions, benefiting from the same pedagogical jesuitical methods and with a strong appeal to discipline and authority.

It is pertinent to remember in this moment that Education in Brazil between the 18th and mid 19th centuries was to some boys. Not all girls were authorized to attend schools to learn their ABC’s and boys who entered those schools did so at advanced ages, usually from ten years old on. Whereas around the years 1843-1844, in Germany and all-around Europe the first kindergartens emerged, founded by Fröebel, Brazil did not even think of institutions of that kind and, still, to young children. (^{SANTANA, 2011}).

In accordance with Del Priore (2010), the first kindergarten created in Brazil emerged in 1896, em São Paulo, was inspired by Pestalozzi’s conception and, although being public, the elite of the time was favoured by having a precedence to enroll. The fact is that by mid 19th century many people still considered child labour better than school, that is, work, besides complementing the family income, avoided the child to be idle.

That was the result of an education which belatedly arrived in our country if compared to other Western countriesin which capitalism settled at the dawn of the Middle Ages. Brazil, a poor country, with vestiges and habits of its old colonial system, with a belated industrialization, did not find room for new issues, among them the ones concerning public teaching, to flourish. “Without the presence of an economic system which demanded physical and mental adequacy from individuals to this new reality, new instruments that would allow the adaptation to this new scenario were not implemented” (^{DEL PRIORE, 2010}, p. 10).

We will see, from that moment on, how Brazilian childhood was seen from the 1890 decade onward. We would like to mention in advance that, as Lajolo (1997), we think that historical studies about childhood are a set of sciences which expresses the various impresssions regarding children, made by “outsiders” and demonstrating beliefs about chuldhood that, in several moments, can be destitute of values and contradictions.

“Together, arts and sciences start favouring that childhood be what people say it is...and, simultaneously, become the field from which new concepts and new models of being in childhood can be negotiated” (LAJOLO, 1997, p. 232).

Our intention, however, is to reflect upon some historical events from the 1890 decade onward that contributed to the existence, still nowadays, in our schools, of some kinds of deprivation from/to childhood, such as body disciplinarization, the stealing of the ludic, the traditional methods and the resistance to the new, that, in many instances, can still be witnessed in the current school context.

The Brazilian progressive context and the actions towards childhood: the children as the Republic “heirs”

The official abolition of slavery in 1888 represented, partly, some changes in the Brazilian scenario. We state “partly”, because many habits, mainly those related to ideology and predominance of the customs belonging to the ruling class (we understand “ruling class”, in this context, the white man, bourgeois and Europeanized, not necessarily European) have remained (and, why not mention) remain rooted for a long time in Brazilian society.

Firstly, we need to understand that the “Slavery Abolition” did not mean the full freedom of black people in Brazil at the time. As Del Priore (2010), reminds us, after Abolition many of the teenagers and children who lived at slave quarters stayed there due to the impossibility of maintaining themselves in an autonomous way - they kept working in farms labouring heavily or working as domestic employees. Another option would be venturing in the first colonial cities, which would usually end up in a life of begging and misery.

In the 18th century, with the end of the mining frenzy, children coming from homes kept by free and manumitted women would wander streets living off expedients many times considered suspicious - our current “gigs” - and alms. The first criminal statistics conceived in 1900 would already reveal that these street children, then so-called “punks”, were responsible for thefts, thievery, vagrancy and wounds, having on malice and cunning the main weapons for their survival. Today, when questioned by the State social service, they say with their own words what we have already known from the beginning of the century: the street is a means of living! (^{DEL PRIORE, 2010}, p. 13).

Shortly a year later, after the so-called Golden Law promulgation, Brazil Pouco mais de um ano, após a promulgação da Lei Áurea, Brazil at the end of the 19th century was going through another historic moment: the transition from Empire (disguised as a government ruled by slave farmers, as some prefer) to Republic. Dom Pedro II, the emperor of our country back then and the one responsible for the regime formalization, acted as a political arbiter between those resistant to the republican idea and teh groups which supported freedom of speech, specially in the political context. Dom Pedro II was neither viewed as an absolutist nor as a bold politician like his father, Dom Pedro I, and despite having good intentions, his government left as a heritage a tradition of valuing institutions and a centraliztion in elitist political groups that kept restricted and closed for a long time. (^{CARVALHO, 1997}).

Brazil was then under much of debate about how to seek development for a country which, from colony, intended to be a synonym of advancement to the world. According to Kuhlmann Júnior (1998), the concept of civilization influenced the major ideas all around the world then. It is understood by “civilization” the belief in progress through science and the mobilization among several nations to adapt to the new production process. “The countries have made inventories of their potentialities and achievements, and the records about many social life aspects, wtitten on that period, announced the trail of civilization towards progress” (KUHLMANN JÚNIOR, 1998, p. 27).

In that in this context, a true spirit of nationalism involved various social sectors in a movement that traveled through Europe, the United States, reaching Latin America and, consequently, Brazil. In the midst of the various currents at the time, such as political, economic, social and capitalist transformations, there was also a concern with a previously invisible figure: the child, who ceases to be the object of sole interest to the family and the church, and becomes also a target of State actions (^{RIZZINNI, 2011}).

In that context, child represented the “future of the nation”, because if they were instructed on time, that would be very useful in the short and long terms to republican ideals. Conforming to Rizzini (2011), that context demanded the elaboration of a contingency, recovery and repression plan, for the child was reckoned as being who needed to be watched, educated and shaped and, if that was the case, recovered, since the threatening child was seen as such for being raised loose and in an undisciplined way, conducted by the “crime schools”, such as streets ans detention centers.

It was not hard to observe in Brazil, by the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century that several problems already affected our country, shown through a very excludent day-by-day, which directly disturbed Brazilian children. Such fact is perceived mainly by foreigners who spent some time or came to live in Brazil ath that time, as we can observ in some of the letters by Ina Von ^{Binzer (2011}):

Rio de Janeiro, December 24, 1881. Evening.

[...] Once again I admire here the endurance of the natives' nerves; in spite of the defeaning noise, they all live on the street or more or less on the street. If, according to a principle upheld by a famous professor in Berlin, every educated seeks for a quiet living in their house, we will get to the conclusion that, in terms of culture, we find ourselves here in identical conditions to Abraham's towards the righteous ones, in Sodom. The unoccupied negroes are not anywhere but at the street doors, smoking and spitting; children roam on streets day and night; the small merchant and even the best trader from distinguished streets stand at their doors when there are no customers, chattering with passersby; when the sunlight allows it, each balcony and window gets busy by idle morons. (^{BINZER, 2011}).

^{Leite (1997}) in his study made about analysis of letters from travelers throughout Brazil during the 19^th century depicts many curiosities on the Brazilian customs in that period. The author warns us to the fact that we should avoid rash judgement, since it is about the view by who writes such letters, although it is possible to realize that, to many foreigners, the Brazilians were not well-regarded due to several of their customs, such as the fact that slaveholders' children and black children would play together and loose around the farms, that white mothers would give their babies so that black women in the farms would breastfeed and take care of them for much longer; that when, at last, the abolition of slaves took place, many people appeared roaming the streets, that the Brazilian family had a totally different manner of raising their children, and also, the fact that Brazilian children began adult life precociously, through sex and addiction .

We can see in many fragments from two of the letters, published by ^{Leite's study (1997}) that numerouschildren were considered “adults” for many things:

In Brazil there are no children in the English sense. The youngest girl wears necklaces and bracelets and eight-year-old boys smoke cigarettes. I ran into a group of boys coming back from school, one afternoon. A young fellow, apparently at the age of seven, took from his pocket a pack of cigarettes and offered each one at a time. Nobody showed any disapproval about such a young boy to be smoking. These boys' language is terrible, although I need to admit that, as the coachmen in London, they do not realize they are using such foul expresions. (EDGECUMBE, 1886, apud ^{LEITE, 1997}, p. 39).

Scenes like those, in a beginner Republican Brazil, bothered plenty of people. It was then thad the child started to be seen as a delinquent, but also as a malleable being: it was necessary, above all, that the State intervened and welcomed these “morally” abandoned beings.

According to Kuhlmann Júnior (1998) the educational intentionality began to have protagonism from discussions which sought collaboration for Brazil to become “civilized” - in that moment, childhood starts to be considered, especially from 1870 on, by legal, sanitary and educational spheres. In the legal sphere, the concern was about this delinquent child, from a poor family, who needed to be controlled and regenerated. In the sanitary sphere the debate was over how it was possible to control social distribution under the perspective of improving Brazilian race and the cultivation of nationalism and, finally, in the educational sphere, how school could contribute in all those actions through moral, intellectual and body discipline.

In agreement with ^{Rizzinni (2011}), educating a poor child meant to shape them to submission. There was, in that period, a concern about educating the people, for the world economic spheres in that context demanded another sort of preparation: training for a job market which was completely different from the one to which Brazil was accustomed since its settlement. It was necessary to rethink an education that would reflect capitalist ideals which were emerging, little by little, on the Brazilian horizons. However, literate elite’s preoccupation was also promoting an education to civilize, without, though, Porém, a preocupação da elite letrada também era de promover uma educação para civilizar sem, no entanto, giving up control and surveillance which, before, applied to slave quarters and now would apply to other means of work. It is worth highlighting that the poor were seen as a threat to the bourgeois elite and they (the poor) could never suspect that together they could cause social rebellions, protests and claims which might be extremely relevant towards a social equity in Brazil. The idea was modernizing, but maintaining the status quo.

Therefore, childhood came to be seen as a member of the civilizing action in that period, worthy of concern and future planning. Behavioral changes over children, such as moral and physical acts of violence, considered commonplace in certain periods, come to be regarded as disapproval, for the child was the nation’s future, a “come to be” who would build our country.

It was in that context, according to Kuhlmann Júnior (2010), that many new ideas circulated about childhood, through meetings, symposia and international congresses in which the intellectual Brazilian elite tried to participate. Initially, Brazilian participation was marked by personal relations occurred in travels and also through the first issues and translations of publications. Later, in the last third of the 19^th century, those relations broaden by associations and congresses at national and international levels, which spread such pedagogical and institutional proposals.

In Latin America, debate started to gain prominence from the 20^th century onward. Following the examples of international congresses at the time, the First Pan American Child Congress happened in Buenos Aires, in 1916. The second took place in 1919 in Montevideo and the third, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 during the Centenary of Independence organized together with the First Brazilian Congress on Child Protection. In accordance with Kuhlmann Júnior (2010), the period between 1870 and 1920 was to think about proposals and initiatives that could spark off debate about ties with childhood and educational organization, which begins to have more visibility with the formalization, by the State, of institutions and associations which would contribute with such instruction of the Brazilian child in various spheres, as for example administrative, political, educational, scientific and cultural instances, among others.

At the same period of time, the obligatoriness for the presence of children at schools started to be discussed in the Brazilian educational scenario. In Europe, according to Marcílio (2010), that had been taking place since the 17^th century. It was necessary, though, that Brazil could solve another problem, of a much greater magnitude than children's obligatoriness itself at school: it was crucial that schools themselves really existed. By the end of the Imperial era, at a historical moment not that far from the context which we have just described, literacy classes used to work in completely precarious, reduced, environments, without lighting and ventilation, besides being improper and dirty. Let us see in ^{Marcilio (2010}) a description of a school in São Paulo in 1864, which can be considered valid for all the other schools in the Empire era:

The “school” worked in the same house where the schoolmaster would live. The literacy teachers all belonged to lower classes and could only afford renting cheap houses, located in the most precarious areas, far from the more populated centres of towns and villages. Many of them were daub houses, covered by thatch and not rarely with dirt floors, small, without sufficient lighting and ventilation. (^{MARCILIO, 2010}, p. 48).

Still according to ^{Marcilio (2010}), schools did not have materials for learning to read and write, did not own books or furniture for the children to sit and not even a blackboard and there were children of different ages in the same group. Such was the situation of paulista schools in the 1870's when the Empire already showed signs of decay.

In addition, Marcílio (2010) reminds us that other factors, such as the distance to be covered by children from home to school (some would walk approximately two hours to get to the school facilities), the necessity of working to help at home and other kinds of distractions, as game tables (that kind of activity was widely disseminated and popular around here), contributed for the kids to drop out school. So, evasion rates were very high and attendance was much lower in numbers if compared to the number of enrolled students.

Brazil had plenty of social problems and there was, in that moment of a dawn to Repubilcan ideas, a unity among doctors, jurists and clergymen, so that it would be possible to think of how education and assistance to Brazilian children should be. On the “educational revolution” issue, we will see further that São Paulo State took the lead and was pioneer in Brazil in the sense of rethinking education to modern days, becoming a model for the other Brazilian States, especially in the period of the First Republic, from 1889 to the 1930's.

However, before we can discuss how this revolutionary process took place, how the syllabus was conceived and how the organization of paulista educational institutions was established, we think it is relevant in this moment to reflect about the ideology behind the whole infrastructure adopted by São Paulo and, primarily, what was the role education of children’s bodies throughout this historical process.

The civilizing process by childhood: disciplinarization through children’s bodies at the school environment

We have already mentioned previously that several institutions came to worry about childhood in Brazil, especially in the First Republic period (1889 - 1930). Among them all, school Entre todas elas, school played a leading role in that process, though it did not mean, since then, a true institutionalization of school to the masses. ^{Romanelli (2010}) points out that what has occurred since colonization of american lands was a real cultural transplant - a transfer of habits, customs, ideas types of economic and commercial activities, everything according to the settler’s social and political organization. It was not different with Education.

In that case, the social ruling class’ intellectual transfer ended up guiding the implementation of the first Brazilian educational systems In that context of the First Republic, imposition and preservation of imported educational models prioritized school acces only to some children from wealthier classes. School was, bach then, an institution which favoured a small part of the population (^{ROMANELLI, 2010}).

During the whole Empire period popular education was abandoned. With the republican ideas, at last came discussions over the necessity of a school to everyone, at least in theory. It happens that with the Constitution of the Republic in 1891, the federative system decentralized education, as ^{Romanelli (2010}) explains, which resulted in the following division: the remaining of Brazilian states were commissioned to create and control with full autonomy primary and vocational education, and that resulted, at the time, in normal schools for girls and technical schools for boys.

Such organization favoured to what ^{Romanelli (2010}) names “dual teaching”, for the federal government would worry about the school for a ruling class, while the states would be concerned with schools for the people. That just formalized something which had already been happening at the Empire era, that is, there were no significant changes in the educational Brazilian system.

Taking into account, thus, the elitist ideas of that time, which were formed according to slave standards with origins in the colonial period, the implementation of the “new” Brazilian educational system did not have substantial changes. Putting technical and primary edcuation at the mercy of each State, the educational investment was obviously different in many locations of our country, once some States like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, for instance, had political and even economic situations which were considered privileged if compared to many States in the northeast. We can see, then, education and culture being boosted in some regions, above all São Paulo and in the other States in the southeast region of Brazil (^{ROMANELLI, 2010}).

Adept of european ideas, once Brazil believed that in order to be civilized, it would have to try matching up to Europe, it was once more considered to import such ideas, occurring again, as ^{Romanelli (2010}) would say, a cultural transplant. As for the Brazilian school, on of the core ideas was about disciplinarization forms in the school context, which happened, among other ways, through the corporal conduct.

In accordance with Gomes-da-Silva (2012) it is through the body that there is/was investment in civilizing and capitalist strategies. The Brazilian body is both cultural construct and constructor of meaning and significance. Education of the Brazilian body had in gymnastics one of its first models of corporal conduct, which the author defines as “bourgeois corporal conduct”.

Corporal conduct in a civilizing sense, because we understand it as pne of the elements wich aim at civilizing/educating the man, since childhood, modifying his personality, or preventing socially acceptable behavior transgressions, upon a gesture pedagogy (^{GOMES-DA-SILVA, 2012}, p. 13).

The author explains the use of the term “bourgeois corporal or motor conduct”, not because it is typical of the bourgeois, but because it was part of the bourgeois goals to replace life standards of Brazil in the beginning of the 20th century, seeking for a new way of organizing our country’s economy and perform, in the meantime, a social reordering, and that included reorganize the motor conduct of the Brazilian body, so that it could meet new habit standards which, in their turn, could meet the new automated world (^{GOMES-DA-SILVA, 2012}).

The bourgeois corporal conduct aimed at modelling behavior and gestures of individuals since childhood and had its first pedagogical systematization named “Gymnastics” in the French, American and Industrial Revolution periods. Such conduct was incorporated as civilizable behaviors and very accepted at the bourgeois community, being therefore named by Gomes-da-Silva (2012) as “bourgeois corporal” conduct.

Gymnastics, later called Physical Education, was directly linked to body education which was understood as a human being, constituted of two distinct and autonomous parts: body and mind. Physical Education became, then, the school subject which aimed at “educating the body” of the Brazilians, which was uneducated, indelicate, rough, rude, gross, and so it was up to Physical Education at school to make this very body an agile, strong and aesthetically beautiful body (^{GOMES-DA-SILVA, 2012}).

The outcome, according to bourgeois educational goals, was just one: create individuals civilly well-behaved and subordinate to standards which ruling society at the time would impose. Bourgeois education did not seek, though, only the education of the body through physical activities, but also had as its goal education to work. With the universalization of education, Gymnastics had a crucial role in the worker’s adaptation to the new life pace and new technologies at factories. In that moment it was also important to think of a kind of Gymnastics which could involve women and children, for, according to Gomes-da-Silva (2012), those two groups were subordinate to the civilizing process: the exploitation of child and female labor was among the strategic interests to increase production and profit.

There was a strong will for making of Brazil a cultured country, trying to match European levels, mostly by the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. What was done in Europe was also implemented in our country and to Gomes-da-Silva (2012), in that context, a systematized, biomechanized motor behavior was prioritized, which had nothing to do, as we will further explain with Brazilian bodies.

The body disciplinarization is also observed by ^{Foucault (1987}): schools were conceived with the organization of a serial space, with people walking in lines, with an organized time, determined by a bell. Obedience to only one person, activity control and the predefined collective pace are also other characteristics of body domestication existing until nowadays in many school institutions.

To ^{Foucault (1987}), it is about working the body in detail, exerting a kind of relentless coercion to keep it always at the mechanical level, imflicting on them a docility-utility relation, something we may call discipline.

Discipline fabricates sloppy and exercised bodies, “docile” bodies. Discipline increases body strengths (in economic terms of utility) and decreases those strengths (in political terms of obedience). In a word: it dissociates stregnth from the body; it makes strenght, on the one hand, an “aptitude”, a “capacity” that it seeks to increase; on the other hand, the energy, the power which could result from that, and it makes of it a relation of strict subjection (^{FOUCAULT, 1987}, p. 127).

According to ^{Foucault (1987}), no institution performs this task of disciplining bodies as well as the school. There, “activities are curbed as much as possible by orders that must be carried out immediately” (^{FOUCAULT, 1987}, p. 137) and the time which is measured and paid must be e o tempo medido e pago deve ser uninterrupted and nullify everything which can contribute to any distractions that harm production.

Conforming to ^{Carvalho (1997}), Brazilian school let itself influence at that moment by the new paces of the techical society and the machinery. It was about paces that prescribed pedagogical disciplinary interventions. Men's adjustment to the new life conditions and to new values demanded the standardization of behaviors and actions. In that case, the adaptation of the infant body would be efficient to the future of Brazil. “Disciplining is no longer preventing or correcting. It is shaping. It is relying on the plasticity of the childlike nature, with its adptability, with its natural adjustment capacity to purposes set by society” (^{CARVALHO, 1997}, p. 308).

However, how did actions take place, in a practical way, so that this adaptation of the childlike body to the new pace, dictated by society and the school context, could happen? If Brazilian schools teemed with problems and the autonomy of States to the elaboration of the technical and primary education has caused a very large gap of the Brazilian educational systems among one another, how was it possible to discipline children's bodies for this “new” Brazil? How was it possible to turn school into that adjustment machine of the “nation's future”?

Having recently left a slave regime, Brazil from the 1890's showed a kind of euphoria towards the new ideals that arose: the possibility of economic, political, social and educational development were the topics which boosted the most this excitement. We will see from now on how those ideals consolidated in the paulista public Education also through the disciplinarization of the body.

The paulista school of the First Republic: For whom? What for?

We have seen until here that paulista schools from the end of the 19th century worked in very precarious ways. There were many issues to be tackled and when the government decided to delegate technical and primary education system organization to States, São Paulo was among the first ones to mobilize so that this structuring could occur, due to the euphoria of the new ideals and the will to modernize before the country and the world.

It is needed, however, to remember that in a moment prior to the then province of Rio de Janeiro, more precisely the fluminense capital, was the place which was the closest to the much desired “European stereotype” of civilization (^{RIZZINNI, 2011}), due to the presence of the Portuguese Crown since the beginning of the 19th century.

Dom Pedro II school, founded 1837, offered to the carioca elite, although it denominated itself public, an already serial study, with the introduction of subjects such as music and gymnastics, for example. The school was known for having a modern structure for the time, if compared to others, and the pupil would finish it graduated in Languages, and able to enter in any higher education course in the country. It was, though, conceived in the imperial molds, with the aim of instructing the crown children so that they, in the future, could enter some higher course without having to leave Brazil to study in Europe (GÓIS JÚNIOR; BATISTA, 2010).

Also, in that same time, from 1835 onward, the province of São Paulo started to take the first steps towards the structuring of a Normal School which aimed at the teachers’ training to work in primary education. That structuring, however, was slow and gradual - in 1846 the paulista assembly approved its creation; the female section was founded in 1847 (the male section worked from 1846 to 1866); it was closed in 1866, reopened in 1875 already in the building attached to the Largo São Francisco Law School and closed again in 1878. For all those reasons, it is possible to infer that paulista education was struggling to consolidate its educational system at the time of the Empire (GÓIS JÚNIOR; BATISTA, 2010).

In the 1880’s, with the rise of republican changes winds, Normal School is reopened. With an extremely positivist influence, there was an atmosphere of debate in various sectors which should contribute, in that moment, to the education of paulista children: the legislation would express itself through jurists, religion, (more precisely catholicism) and the welfare through social service and philanthropy, the doctors through hygienism and eugenics and even engineers through the proper educational architecture (KUHLMANN JÚNIOR, 1998; ^{MONARCHA, 1997}).

Concerning the school architecture, São Paulo also stood out as pioneer and solved a problem from that time which was very relevant so that a possible advancement in the education quality could take place: the construction of school buildings, conceived in the contemporary molds of the time. The then “Square Normal School”, as it was known in its opening on August 2, 1894, caused a real educational architectural revolution in Brazil (^{MONARCHA, 1997}).

The new educational construction configuration, thought by paulista republicans, considered, at least in theory, paulista children in general: from the newcomers to the black, white, mulatto, mixed-race paulista child, in short, the Republic “heirs”. The “Square Normal School” soon became the model to be adopted in the building of new school groups all around the country (^{MONARCHA, 1997}).

During the 1890’s normal and primary education were organized, then followed the organization of high school, kindergarten, and the paulista Polytechnic Education meeting (^{MONARCHA, 1997}), which was held by Antônio Caetano de Campos, known later as “General Reform of São Paulo Public Instruction”.

According to Góis Junior e Batista (2010), Antônio Caetano de Campos was a doctor and has been appointed to the position of Director of São Paulo Normal School by Rangel Pestana, an activist of the republican movement who, at the time, held one of the positions in the São Paulo State provisional government. Besides practicing medicine, Caetano de Campos was also a teacher at Pestana School (which belonged to Rangel Pestana’s family), place where they met, and was a supporter of the same pedagogical ideals considered most suitable by the republican movement, among them the pedagogical influence based on Pestallozzi and Fröebel, and by the North-American educational model, based on Protestant principles.

Caetano de Campos had biological ideals about reality which matched liberal convictions, something regarded by many very coherent with that end of the 19th century context. The curriculum reform of Normal School, just like its organization by the introduction of practical and utilitarian activities, such as Gymnastics, became the republican model to be followed all around Brazil (GÓIS JUNIOR; BATISTA, 2010).

“Gymnastics” and “Military Exercise” discipline was introduced in paulista primary schools during that 1890 reform and meant that the new Normal School had a modern curriculum. But such was no indication that those subjects were a reality at the majority of São Paulo publich schools, for Gymnastics classes suffered many difficulties to be effectively implemented. One of them was the lack of trained teachers, and when such professionals were present, although having status and being treated as teachers, their wages were lower than the other professionals. “Although School understood its importance in the instruction of students, that was not reflected in the valorization of the professional” (GÓIS JÚNIOR; BATISTA, 2010, p. 81).

The fact is that we can say, officially, it is from that moment on that the introduction of physical activities practice happens in the school context, aiming at the formation of the human being, more specifically, the formation of the future republican of our country. In the beginning of Normal School, classes would happe twice a week to normalists of male and female sections. There was a difference in that, at the female section, there were no “Military Exercises” which were replaced by the “Aptitudes and School Exercises” section. In primary schools, “Gymnastics” occurred at the male section, in the levels equivalent nowadays from 1st to 5th grades. At the female section, activities were performed three times a week for all grades, except the 1st, which had classes twice a week (GÓIS JÚNIOR; BATISTA, 2010).

The arguments for the “Gymnastics” to be introduced in the paulista schools’ curricula were based on the search for an integral education, using theses which supported themselves on the view of the body as a machine that should be cared for and the typical idea of healthy mind in a healthy body (GÓIS JÚNIOR; BATISTA, 2010).

To ^{Carvalho (1997}) the “new” discourse which boasted chidhood as the main object of disciplinary intervention was totally coherent with the discourse concerning intervention through the body. The author highlights that, already in 1941, the most ambitious implementation of educational practices considered at that time as scientific took place: the Experimental Pedagogy Laboratory setup, at the Psychology and Pedagogical Anthropology department, which worked at an annex of the São Paulo Normal Secondary School. The goal of this new institution was to improve at the “scientific studies” of childhood, by using foreign techniques.

For this, the Director of the Normal School of Modena, in Italy, Ugo Pizzoli, was invited, so that he could take charge of the training courses organization, for teachers all over São Paulo State. Among the first novelties that calls our attention, is the establishment of a “School Biographical Portfolio”, which was used all around paulista State. That portfolio should be signed by the teaching unit director, by the teachers of each grade and by the school physician; it would contain the student's data related to the previous five years, such as annual pictures, anthropological and physiopsychological observations, besides family anamnestic data notes, physique, racial type, moral traits, heredity marks and normality, abnormality or degeneration rates. With this cross-check it was possible to delineate the specific chatarcter of the student (^{CARVALHO, 1997}).

The intention was understanding, through physical and clinical exams, the normal and abnormal personality of chilren, and, furthermore, discriminate those who fit in the normal, abnormal or degenerate physical levels. In this case, those assessed as normal, could attend school normally, with no problems whatsoever, while the ones assessed as abnormal would need a better specification, distinguishing the kind of anomaly which could be severe or simple, and, in that case, were allowed to attend school. As for the degenerate, they should be totally excluded from normal schools, whatever their degenerative character was (^{CARVALHO, 1997}).

It was a way which “Scientific Pedagogy” sought to justify social inequalities and to try explaining progress and the delay of peoples through the scars existent on their bodies which, observed, measured, rated and corrected, would fit in stereotypes determined by nature and not, according to such assessment, by society itself (^{CARVALHO, 1997}).

Other idelas also corroborated to the issue of childhood as the main object of pedagogical intervention. The kindergartens movement disseminated by Fröebel in Europe proclaimed the protagonist role of women in childhood education - women were summoned to transcend their maternal, private and domestic roles to the pedagogical and public contexts. Family and school would be complementary in children’s education and no longer dichotomous in that process (KUHLMANN JÚNIOR, 1998).

The first paulista public Kindergarten was “Caetano de Campos Kindergarten”, an annex of Normal School, opened on May 18, 1896. It was a new building, with four large rooms and a central hall that had, hanging on its walls, porttraits of Froebel, Pestalozzi and Rousseau. For a long time, according to Kuhlmann Júnior (1998), it had as clients the paulistana elite, which supposedly had privileges and was favoured in enrollments.

The scheduling of activities showed a concern with kids’ control and surveillance, easily noticed through time division itself: it was a four-hour attendence with twenty activities programmed, each one lasting fifteen minutes at most. On Saturdays, the classes had a freer schedule, with oral language activities, games, songs and tours. According to the “Gardeners Guide”, the amount of time recommended to each activity was from 20 to 30 minutos, games should be held with the children sitting and interspersed with action games (those in which children would mimic birds’ flights, swimming, the the act of sowing and plowing the land, etc.), through gymnastics and vocal exercises (KUHLMANN JÚNIOR, 1998).

Conforming to Kuhlmann Júnior (1998) there were five types of activities developed with children during their routine: everyday activities, language ones, physical activities, endowments and expressive activities. Activities of each type were distributed such as follows: everyday activities were considred rituals, for they would happen every day, such as the entrance with songs and greetings, the resting, the recess, the meal, the reflections, the farewell songs and the exit. Lines were also considered the most adequate formations to children’s displacement; the language activities were those done through narrative and conversations, such as sound games, syllabication, dialogues, etc.; the phisical activities were centered on activities such as the recess, tours and excursions, gymnastics, marches, musical games, organized games and toys. Gymnastics too, disseminated by Fröebel as work integrated by mind and body, should be made of regulated exercises, progressive from simple to complex, included of positions, steps, marches, leaps and should not be dissociated from games and plays.

As for the toys and organized games, the first term referred to ring of roses kind of plays, made of movement and mimicking generally accompanied by sung marches, while the second are activities which provide contact with nature and with other people through expressive physical motor exercises; the endowments were activities that would favour the education of the senses in order to develop expression of the children’s instincts; and, finally, the expressive activities, were the art activities in general, such as drawing, painting, music, color recognition, etc. (KHULMANN JÚNIOR, 1998).

Kuhlmann Júnior (1998) also highlights that activities in primary schools were performed through gestures and ritualized actions. Entrance and exit at school with music, in lines, educators’ gestures, body formations, repetition, among others, were examples of how that occurred. “It is important to bear in mind that, besides repeated moments every day by routine, the other activities developed at kindergarten also presented a ritualistic mode of development” (KUHLMANN JÚNIOR, 1998, p. 130).

That ritualization of bodily gestures was an attempt of controlling the children as much as possible. And even when activities would suggest body movement, such as gymnastics classes for example, movements were usually standardized and mechanical, leaving, maybe to children, the moment of recess... Or at least it should leave. Analyzing the “Internal Regulation of Public Schools of São Paulo”, from 1891, we can see that not always children had the right to this moment.

In Chapter IV of the aforementioned regulation, which dealt with school discipline, in Articles 24 and 25, the application of awards was stipulated (such as compliments in front of the class, distribution of cards for good grades, distinct special seating location in the room, inclusion of the student’s name on the honor roll), the way teachers would decide to apply. As for punishments, some penalties were established, which could vary according to teachers’ will and the severity of the occurred act, among them, on item “d” of Article 27 the “recess deprivation, keeping the punished students under either the assistant’s or the teacher’s surveillance, in the classroom itself or in the recess” (SÃO PAULO, 1891, p.21). On a sole paragraph of that Article there was, however, a “consolation” clause: “sole §. The deprivation of school recess should not be complete, it will be determined so that the student can have at least five minutes of total freedom”. (SÃO PAULO, 1891, p. 21).

Recess deprivation is something that has been happening until the present day. Despite a lot of chattering over the fact we cannot deprive children of that moment, for it is their right to have such time, this is a practice that still resists in school contexts nowadays.

Besides recess deprivation established by the regiment, other forms of control are also possible to be observed in the paulista regiment of 1891. In Chapter III, article 15, we can notice that adult control was frequent inside the classroom to such an extent that furniture from that time would have been made in order to facilitate surveillance:

Article 15: School furniture will be such as determined by the Superior Council, A mobília escolar contará da que for determinada pelo Conselho Superior, its construction should be based on models which most facilitate teachers’ surveillance, students’ responsibility and the fulfillment of hygienic precepts. (SÃO PAULO, 1891, p.7).

It is not possible nowadays to infer whether actual norms related to the making of school furniture are the same - aiming to the teacher’s effective surveillance (it is not even our goal to ascertain its existence) inside classrooms -, but it is a fact that such supervision exercised by the teacher or other adults who work at the school environment occurs nowadays in various forms.

What we intend, then, with such discussion about body disciplinarization, specially through children’s bodies in school contexts, is to allow ourselves the following reflection: why, for over a century, have we been trying to mold our children through the school and through the body? Why, until nowadays, can we realize there is a deprivation of the movement, the game, the plays and other significations that lead us to the “ludic individual” in school contexts? Whu has not school allowed itself to develop in the sense of seeing ludic as an important ally inside schools - on the contrary, we still think of standard conduct impositions through children’s bodies?

School, unfortunately, has frozen in time, as ^{Freire (2006}) would say. We understand that the many educational problems, which are not worth mentioning here, given their multitude, still take place because school has not changed, while many sectors of our society, people, means of communication, the whole world have changed. If people have changed, if our students are very different from the time when we used to study, if our children are no longer the same, school, which is one of the institutions that is most linked to people´s scientific, technical and human training, in the beginning of their lives, it should also have sought for this transformation.

We believe that such historical explanation takes us to a reflection: nowadays, what occurs in many school institutions is the fruit of choices made in the past. It is not up to us, now, to judge whether such decisions were the most correct or not, if the real motivations were good or bad. What really matters is to think: until when will we react, in the current school, with thoughts guided by the last century? Today’s child is modern, globalized, with typical virtual needs, which attempt to break cultural and social frontiers through technologies. That is what Feicha (2011) calls “generation @”, the first globalized generation of the 21st century - not to mention generations “x”, “y”, “z”... We are with online kids to the world, while school keeps off-line in many aspects - ludic practices inside school context is one of them.

Final considerations

We have seen that many were the forms used to the children’s body disciplinarization in the Brazilian school context. “Disciplined body” can be understood as that immobile, still, silent body that, in the current conception of many, is a body which learns more and better.

Regardless of the reason for this view to still perpetuate n our schools in many moments, para que essa visão ainda se perpetue em nossas escolas em muitos momentos, be of historical order, for convenience, because of poor training, lack of time, for the fact that there is little room in the curriculum to ludic practices, for the little financial investment, for the minimum recognition of the game and play as important, for the absence of public policies which recognize specificities of playfulness, etc.; we need to reflect and change some of our pedagogical conceptions regarding this issue in Education.

The theft of playfulness in Brazil school contexts is something which has been dragging on since the beginning of its schooling process and it is still normal for us to witness in some schools, for example, punishment through the subtraction of recess to chlidren who “do not behave very well” - something that began at public shools’ routine a long time ago.

We affirm “still”, because we can see that many of our customs, habits, rules and concepts currently adopted as disciplinarization in a school context are historically originated over a century ago. Several obsolete punishment models to children through immobility impositions in the period when they are at schools still occur very frequently. Considering the rapid changes in our society, especially the ones which took place in the 20th century, such as globalization, technological advancements, the celerity of information amazingly spread by the Internet, social and cultural values, among others, we can assert with conviction that Brazilian public school, literally, still stood in time.

We affirm so, because it is not possible for education to encourage our children to be inquisitive about scientific knowledge, if it curbs children’s cultures in several instances through the curtailment of the movement, through the hindrance of showing their opinions, through the refusal of their speech, through the prohibition of the ludic. Most schools nowadays seem to work against ludic expericences which children may have with their peers in this environment, still with the old and strong claim that the game and the play make our children lose control, lead them to indiscipline, besides the fact that ludic practices are directly associated to less important areas for some teachers, for the “important” subjects are those which “make one think”, and in order to think it is necessary to have silence, which in its turn demands attention, which requests immobility and obedience. A real snowball effect!

The fact is that sadly, up to our days, we still witness the theft of the ludic in schools. The children currently inserted in our educational system are, at every moment, revealing to us how rigorous game and play deprivation can be in that context, and concerning reflections about possible reasons why these prohibitions still occur in the school context, we believe to have, through this paper, reflected about some of them. The main one, undoubtedly, was establish a link between the past, our educational history, and the many social and political contexts which contributed to what we still nowadays call children’s body disciplinarization in many schools.

We cannot, however, abstain ourselves of inferring that, regardless of time, context, current policies, and the prohibition of children’s playful manifestations by the adults, throughout history, children always find a way to keep being children, which is manifested through ludic practices in which we cannot interfere, as the “ficticious” case of the “girl who learned to fly” (“ficticious” in quotes, for we know that although it is about a made up story, as highlighted at the beginning of this paper, it happens very often in many school institutions) and that it helped as an illustration to start our discussion about many schools’ reality nowadays.

Moving from fiction to real life, children belonging to many school contexts challenge what is already pre-established by adults. We may try, several times, to abolish the ludic, but we will not succeed, for it will always exist in the dreams and will be part of most children’s lives.

Lúcia started looking out the window and clpuds passed by, so white, and the sky was so blue, and somewhere in the world the waves of the sea hit the shore and raised foam, and at the park there was a Ferris wheel and a rollercoaster.

And on the corner there was the popcorn maker and the man who sold cotton candy, and there was a chubby guy who came along the street whistling such a beautiful song and Lúcia got distracted and let her feet off the school desk and started to rise, rise...

And when Lúcia looked, she saw that Tábata was also flying, and so was Zé Bento, and Cassiano, Denise, Davi, Pedro, Juliana... (...) There were chubby and skinny, short and tall, blonde, mulatto and brunette children, there were bright and stupid children, and all of them flew, laughing a lot, through the sky.

Just one or another child was not able to fly and got a little sad, sitting on their desks.

Ms Isolda got to the window, looked up and shed a salty tear. (Ruth Rocha - The girl who learned to fly).

Regardless of whether we allow it or not, children will continue to play in a place where we, adults, sometimes are not allowed to enter unless children themselves invite us: inside their little minds, through imagination, in their dreams...How about remembering our old childhood and take part of this moment, together with them? We can still transform the historic journey that is yet to come.