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Revista Brasileira de História da Educação

versão impressa ISSN 1519-5902versão On-line ISSN 2238-0094

Rev. Bras. Hist. Educ vol.22  Maringá  2022  Epub 01-Jul-2022

https://doi.org/10.4025/rbhe.v22.2022.e207 

DOSSIER

History of Education and Black Populations

Adlene Arantes1  * 
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7007-0237

José Gonçalves Gondra2 
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0669-1661

Surya Aaronovich Pombo de Barros3 
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7109-0264

1Universidade de Pernambuco, Nazaré da Mata, PE, Brasil.

2Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil.

3Universidade Federal da Paraíba, João Pessoa, PB. Brasil.


Presentation

The Dossier “History of Education and Black Populations” is the result of the public call for the Revista Brasileira de História da Educação, which received 35 proposals. After evaluation, 12 articles were selected, which were in agreement with the rescript as well as received positive opinions from the ad hoc evaluators. The selected texts deal with topics such as women, intellectuals, night classes, work, teaching first letters and higher education, teaching arts and crafts, all of which intersect with the color/race of the subjects involved. They cover periods from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, addressing the issue of education of black populations in different regions such as Bahia, Maranhão, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo. It also contains a text about these issues in Mozambique. The research was carried out by renowned authors in the field, as well as master's and doctoral students from the various regions mentioned, articulating the "old" and the "new" faces in the History of Brazilian Education.

Na face do velho

as rugas são letras,

palavras escritas na carne,

abecedário do viver.

Na face do jovem

o frescor da pele

e o brilho dos olhos

são dúvidas.

Nas mãos entrelaçadas

de ambos,

o velho tempo

funde-se ao novo,

e as falas silenciadas

explodem.

O que os livros escondem,

as palavras ditas libertam.

E não há quem ponha

um ponto final na história

Infinitas são as personagens...

Vovó Kalinda, Tia Mambene,

Primo Sendó, Ya Tapuli,

Menina Meká, Menino Kambi,

Neide do Brás, Cíntia da Lapa,

Piter do Estácio, Cris de Acari,

Mabel do Pelô, Sil de Manaíra,

E também de Santana e de Belô

e mais e mais, outras e outros...

Nos olhos do jovem

também o brilho de muitas histórias.

e não há quem ponha

um ponto final no rap

É preciso eternizar as palavras

da liberdade ainda e agora…

Conceição Evaristo, 2008

For a long time, in research on History of Education, speeches were silenced, and books hid words from black people. This absence for a long period in the historiography of Brazilian education was widely denounced (Fonseca, 2007) and, currently, can be considered a situation in the process of overcoming it. Explanations such as lack of sources, prohibition in the legislation and elitist public schools before the 1950s/60s have been confronted by research carried out since the 2000s (Fonseca, Barros, 2016). The results of these new investments have demonstrated the importance of observing racial relations between whites and blacks in terms of schooling, literacy and contact with the literate universe in Brazil. These works have pointed to a participation, still unequal and generally tense of people of black origin in the development of the Brazilian education, especially from the 19th century onwards.

In 1989, Zeila Demartini published the text that would become a landmark in the history of Brazilian education. The article A escolarização negra em São Paulo na década de 1920 (Black schooling in São Paulo in the 1920s), derived from a research carried out about the old masters of São Paulo, in the First Republic, and called the attention to a theme that had been absent from historiography until then: the relationship between black people and education. In the following years, the theme would be, little by little, incorporated as a concern of other researchers. Timidly, works began to be carried out, and dissertations and theses, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, began to focus on educational processes involving the black population. In 2004, the RBHE chose the theme “Black People and Education” for its first dossier. On the occasion, authors presented research results, problematized the eminently white History of Education and defended the expansion of investigations on this theme.

In the same period, the discussion on race relations, until then very limited to social movements, especially black ones and academic research in areas such as history, anthropology, sociology and education, went beyond these limits and gained space in the press and in public policies. Among the actions to combat racism in education, we mention the approval of Law 10.639/2003, which amended the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education of 1996, instituting the mandatory teaching of “Africa and Afro-Brazilian History and Culture” in the school curriculum, privileging the contribution of the black population in the construction and formation of the Brazilian society. In addition to the approval of the aforementioned law, there were a series of subsequent regulations, such as the National Curricular Guidelines for the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations and for the “Teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African History and Culture”, of 2004, and the “Guidelines and Actions for the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations”, 2006. In addition to these, it is important to mention the approval of the Law 11,645/2008, which included the indigenous theme in the curriculum: “In elementary and high school establishments, public and private, the study of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous history and culture becomes mandatory1” (Brasil, 2008, s.p.).

These and other measures stirred up debates about curriculum, teacher training and teaching materials, something that continues to be disputed today. In this same context, the first racial quotas for higher education were approved in state universities, in 2002, and then in federal institutions and student financing programs for private education, until the approval of Law 12,711, in 2012, which made its mandatory adoption in all federal educational institutions. The referred law instituted the obligation to reserve 50% of the vacancies of federal institutions of higher education for students graduating from public schools, low-income students, black students and indigenous people.

Since then, it is possible to observe the entry of new subjects in the training and research places, including black people and people from lower classes. For the most part, they represent the first family generation at the public university, which has helped to change the scenario of Brazilian science, contributing to the expansion of the research themes and subjects. Currently, the discussion about affirmative action in graduate studies and in public tenders for professors shows the persistence of disputes around the affirmative actions.

Such changes in public policies also contributed to the increase in interest in education from a historical perspective. In the field of the History of Education, the changes are evident. Like other themes studied by the history of education, there is a range of angles, places and periods covered by what we call research on black populations and education.

The works deal with different historical contexts, from the colonial period to the 21st century. It should be highlighted the impact of research on the Empire, which focuses the discussion on the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. This clipping reflects a trend in the historiography of education, that is, the years between 1870 and 1920, which are described as a period of great effervescence of debates and achievements (Nagle, 1976). This movement reached, in different ways, the black populations, in the plural, so that the new studies have contributed to modify the vision that existed about the 19th century. Consequently, they seek to demonstrate that, in the 19th century, “the blacks themselves, individuals of educational action, elaborated strategies and varied actions to enable their access to the world of letters, by building their own representations about the school and giving multiple meanings to schooling2” (Gondra, Schueler, 2008, p. 254).

The republican period is also well covered in researches, reflecting the more general tendency in the history of Brazilian education of privileging republican action. Research on the five current Brazilian geographic regions can be found, and within them, on almost all states, whether in works limited to the imperial period, or in those that refer to the republican period. Such studies cover various topics such as childhood, teaching, gender, ethnicity, higher education, different types of institutions, schooling of the enslaved, naive or freed people, passing through black associations, black intellectuals and literati, among others.

The diversity of analyses, emphases, methodologies and theoretical foundations, of individuals that research and are being researched appear in this Dossier. We received 35 texts for analysis. After evaluation, 12 articles were selected that were in agreement with the rescript as well as received positive opinions from 60 (more or less) ad hoc evaluators, from Brazil and abroad (Argentina, Spain, United States, Mozambique and Portugal). Due to the dossier's terms and limits, 5 were moved to continuous flow. In addition, 18 texts were rejected, 11 of them by the organizers of the dossier, either for reasons of textual organization or because they did not were in agreement with the scope of the dossier's rescript.

The texts chosen are authored by 12 female authors and 5 male authors, from different Brazilian regions. They are professors and graduate students, who work in Bahia, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo and an author from Mozambique. Among them, there are names already established in the research of History of Education and in the History of Education of Black Populations, as well as young researchers who are starting their research paths in the field. It is worth noting that Adriana Maria Paulo da Silva, Eliane Peres and Marcus Vinícius da Fonseca were part of the first dossier on the subject, published by RBHE, returning, 18 years later, with an updated research in this new dossier.

Among the articles, we have the one by Eliane Peres, Ler, escrever e contar entre as mulheres escravizadas: uma história a ser escrita (Reading, writing and telling stories among enslaved women: a history to be written), which it aims at identifying the domain of reading and writing among enslaved women and to analyze the circumstances of this learning in the 19th century, from a research carried out in newspapers available in the Hemeroteca Virtual da Biblioteca Nacional, analyzing different regions such as Bahia, Maranhão, Pará, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

In the text Minas Gerais é muitas”: Negros e Brancos nas escolas do Sul de Minas, no Século XIX (“Minas Gerais é muitas”: Black people and White people in the schools from the South of Minas, in the 19th century), Marcus Vinícius Fonseca and Vanessa Souza Batista analyze the racial and socioeconomic profile of students and aspects related to their family groups in the first half of the XIX century, comparing the public of schools in the southern region of Minas Gerais with that of the central region of the province, highlighting the importance of taking into account regional diversity in analyzes of the history of education in Minas Gerais.

In “Credores de minha estima”: pretos e pardos na instrução pública e privada, no final do século XIX e início do século XX, em Cuiabá-MT” (“My estimated creditors”: black and brown people in public and private instruction at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in Cuiabá - MT), Paulo Sérgio Dutra analyzes the presence of black people and mulattos as students and teachers in the public education between 1857 and 1911. He highlights the black presence in the Diretoria da Instrução Pública, Externatos e Inspeção de Escolas, as well as black women occupying public and private schools of First Letters, journalism and as headships of unions in this period.

In Erudição e racismo na trajetória ascendente de uma família negra do Maranhão (Erudition and racism in the upward trajectory of a black family in Maranhão), Mariléia dos Santos Cruz analyzes the trajectory of the Nascimento Moraes family, approaching the social mobility strategies used by this black family, with emphasis on an erudition project enjoyed in successive generations; it describes the school and professional trajectory of the most outstanding children of professor Nascimento Moraes and registers situations of confrontation of racism, despite the upward trajectory of the family in Maranhão between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

In Retratos e registros de escolas de São João de Meriti (RJ): perfil populacional e trajetórias docentes (1920-1943) (Portraits and records of schools in São João de Meriti (RJ): population profile and teacher's trajectories (1920-1943)), Amália Dias analyzes the racial and population profile of students and teachers from public primary schools in São João de Meriti in the light of the historiography on the presence of non-white populations in public education. As a result, the ways and routines of functioning of the photographed schools are presented, demands for enrollment and teaching trajectories that reveal, between conditions of access and permanence, the possibilities, scope and limits of educational experiences of non-white peripheral populations between 1920 and 1943.

In the text As alunas negras da Escola Doméstica de Nossa Senhora do Amparo (1889-1910) (The black students from Escola Doméstica de Nossa Senhora do Amparo (1889-1910)) Daniel Ferraz Chiozzini and Luciana Silva Leal deal with the schooling process of black girls at the Escola Doméstica Nossa Senhora do Amparo, which aimed to support and instruct orphans, in Petrópolis, between 1889 and 1910, defending that the social place occupied by the graduates of the institution was mostly subaltern, only reconfiguring the relations of exploitation of black women.

In População Negra e Ensino Superior no início do século XX: Considerações sobre o posicionamento do jornal Progresso (1928-1930) (Black Population and Higher Education in the early 20th century: Considerations on the positioning of the newspaper Progresso (1928-1930)), Ana Luiza Jesus da Costa and Mariana Machado Rocha analyze the publications of the newspaper Progresso, from São Paulo, between the years 1928 and 1930, in order to understand how black intellectuals of the early 20th century positioned themselves with regard to higher education, considering not only the formal access of black people to this stage of education, the professions, material, and symbolic benefits to which it gives access to, but also the informal ways of acquiring and manipulating the “learned culture”.

In Abdias Nascimento: a trajetória de um intelectual negro engajado na disseminação de saberes emancipatórios entre as décadas de 1920 e 1940 (Abdias Nascimento: the trajectory of a black intellectual engaged in the dissemination of emancipatory knowledge between the 1920s and 1940s), Carlos Eduardo Vieira and Fabíola Maciel Corrêa analyze the trajectory of the black intellectual, with emphasis on his experience in the Teatro Experimental do Negro, the in order to understand his formation process as an intellectual engaged in the causes of black populations.

In Do sertão ao sul baiano: sociabilidade, circularidade e atuação do intelectual negro Deoclecio Silva (1889-1927) (From the sertão to the south of Bahia: sociability, circularity and performance of the black intellectual Deoclecio Silva (1889-1927)), Cristiane Batista do Santos presents aspects of the trajectory of this Bahian intellectual, professor and writer in Ilhéus in the First Republic, who was part of a network of sociability of intellectuals in the first Republic, in the state capital (Salvador) and in Ilhéus, representing a group that coexisted alongside the colonels, icons of the economic and political elite and, in parallel, constituted a cultural elite that exercised teaching as a potentiating agency of their political ideologies.

In Escola Noturna “O Exemplo”: educação e emancipação dos trabalhadores na imprensa negra do pós-abolição (Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul) (Night School “O Examplo”: education and emancipation of workers in the post-abolition black press (Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul)), Melina Perussatto highlights the struggles for instruction and education in the night school project defended by the newspaper “O Examplo”, from Porto Alegre, at the beginning of the 20th century. Based on the connections with struggles of the labor movement and the attempt to materialize anti-racist diasporic ideas, she explicates the articulations among race, class, and gender in the production of inequalities and in the construction of political conflicts in the post-abolition period.

In O Liceu de Artes e Ofícios do Recife e suas táticas de instrução de trabalhadores negros no período pós-emancipação (The ‘Lyceum of Arts and Crafts of Recife’ and its education tactics of black workers in the post-emancipation period), Adriana Maria Paulo da Silva and Yan Soares Santos analyze the articulated relations between black workers in the building market, members of the Sociedade dos Artistas Mecânicos e Liberais and the public authorities of Pernambuco, defending that the Liceu turned to the instruction of black children in Recife, fought for the dignification of the condition of free and working people and for the maintenance of their collective activities.

In the article A Educação de Populações Indígenas em Moçambique: do Período Colonial ao Início da Era Pós-Independência (The Education of Indigenous Populations in Mozambique: from the Colonial Period to the Beginning of the Post-Independence Era), Nazia Anita Cardoso Bavo focuses on the History of education in Mozambique, marked by the colonizing action of Portugal, from the 15th century until the independence in 1975. She points out a set of colonizing practices of discrimination, marginalization, and imposition of language, as well as cleavage and the creation of a gap between native populations and the children of the colonizers. These social classes were destined for differentiated and penalizing educational agendas for the natives, aiming to reproduce and perpetuate the system of colonial domination, specially through the orientation towards the production of manpower.

It is worth noting that in addition to these 12 texts, the 2022 edition of RBHE publishes two texts initially submitted to the dossier. These are the articles O vôo das graúnas: estudantes negras/os como intelectuais (The flight of the blackbirds: black students as intellectuals), by Alexandra Lima da Silva and Sirlene Alves and Trajetórias formativas (auto)biográficas de educadores(as) nas teses e dissertações brasileiras (2003-2021) (Training (auto)biographical trajectories of black educators in Brazilian theses and dissertations (2003-2021)), by Lia Machado Fiuza Fialho, Charliton José dos Santos Machado and Vanusa Nascimento. In the first one, the authors seek to understand the student struggle of black people in the second half of the 19th century as an expression of black protagonism in the causes of emancipation and citizenship, as well as the subversion of means of social exclusion present in slave society and in the post-abolition period. In the second article, the authors explore the formative trajectories of black educators from the (auto)biographical studies published by the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations between 2003 and 2021. Both articles dialogue with the central theme of the present dossier and in them the readers will find elements that qualify and expand the debate about the education of black populations.

With these contributions, the dossier “História da Educação e Populações Negras” (History of Education and Black Populations) offers an up-to-date overview of studies on the history of education for black populations. The Revista Brasileira de História da Educação, which published a dossier on this theme for almost 2 decades, presents itself as a privileged vehicle for the academic community to have access to the most recent research on the racial issue in the history of Brazilian education. Finally, it is important to privilege the black agenda, and to denounce racism, in its most different manifestations, so that, as Conceição Evaristo says, there is no “end point in history” and that the words of freedom can be eternalized.

REFERENCES

Demartini, Z. B. F. (1989). A escolarização da população negra na cidade de São Paulo nas primeiras décadas do século. Revista da Associação Nacional de Educação, 8(14), 51-60. [ Links ]

Evaristo, C. (2008). Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala. [ Links ]

Fonseca, M. V. (2007). A arte de construir o invisível: o negro na historiografia educacional brasileira. Revista Brasileira de História da Educação, 13, 11-50. [ Links ]

Fonseca, M. V., & Barros, S. A. P. (2016). (Ed.). A história da educação dos negros no Brasil. Niterói: EDUFF. [ Links ]

Gondra, J. G., & Schueler, A. (2008). Educação, poder e sociedade no Império brasileiro. São Paulo: Cortez. [ Links ]

Ministério da Educação/SECAD. (2006). Orientações e Ações para Educação das Relações Étnico-Raciais. Brasília: SECAD. Recuperado de: http://portal.mec.gov.br/dmdocuments/orientacoes_etnicoraciais.pdfLinks ]

Nagle, J. (1976). Educação e sociedade na Primeira República. (2a ed.). São Paulo: EPU; Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Nacional de Material Escolar. [ Links ]

Resolução Nº 1, de 17 de junho de 2004. (2004). Institui as Diretrizes curriculares nacionais para a educação das relações étnico-raciais e para o ensino de história e cultura afro-brasileira e africana na educação básica. Diário Oficial da União, Brasília, DF, 19 maio 2004. Recuperado de: Recuperado de: http://portal.mec.gov.br/dmdocuments/cnecp_003.pdfLinks ]

1In the original: “Nos estabelecimentos de ensino fundamental e de ensino médio, públicos e privados, torna-se obrigatório o estudo da história e cultura afro-brasileira e indígena” (BRASIL, 2008, s.p.).

2In the original: “os próprios negros, sujeitos da ação educativa, elaboram estratégias e ações variadas para viabilizar o acesso ao mundo das letras, construindo suas próprias representações sobre a escola e conferindo múltiplos sentidos a escolarização”

How to cite this text: Arantes, A., Gondra, J. J., & Barros, S. A. P. History of education and black populations. (2022). Revista Brasileira de História da Educação, 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4025/rbhe.v22.2022.e221

18This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4) license.

Received: April 18, 2022; Accepted: April 18, 2022; Published: July 01, 2022

Adlene Arantes is an Associate Professor at the University of Pernambuco/UPE - Campus Mata Norte. She is currently developing the following research themes: Pedagogical press and eugenic discourses (in the area of the history of education); Afro-Brazilian and African Literature in School Libraries in Mata Norte Pernambucana (in the area of Ethnic-Racial Relations). E-mail: adlene.arantes@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7007-0237

José Gonçalves Gondra is a Professor of History of Education at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Researcher at CNPq and FAPERJ, in the Program Scientist of Our State. Associate editor of the Brazilian Journal of History of Education. E-mail: gondra.uerj@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0669-1661

Surya Aaronovich Pombo de Barros is a Professor at the Graduate Program in Education/UFPB and at the Graduate Program in History/UFPB. Member of GHENO - Research Group History of Education in the 19th century Northeast (UFPB) and of NIEPHE - Interdisciplinary Center for Studies and Research in History of Education (USP). Member of NEABI - Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Nucleus of Studies and Research at the Federal University of Paraíba. E-mail: surya.pombo@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7109-0264

Responsible associate editors: Adlene Arantes E-mail: adlene.arantes@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7007-0237

José Gonçalves Gondra E-mail: gondra.uerj@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0669-1661

Surya Aaronovich Pombo de Barros E-mail: surya.pombo@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7109-0264

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