Brazil and the USA: Parallel Trends in Urbanization

 

Brazil and the USA: Parallel Trends in Urbanization

This essay, regarded in Brazil as 'a complete and thorough analysis of the worth of instruction in the country of Washington', was widely circulated among Brazilian elites.484 With international and educational displays, the most recent pedagogical tendency began to spread throughout Western nations. However, it was the Philadelphia Exhibition that introduced Brazilian elites to new educational methods, this time through another French study, Rapport de Philadelphie, published in 1878 by French commissioner Ferdinand Buisson.

In Brazil, Rev. George Chamberlain founded the Escola Americana (later Colégio Mackenzie) in São Paulo in 1870. It became a symbol of modern education for Brazilians. This school pioneered the curricula and educational practices of New York public schools, as well as the first to combine girls and boys in the same classroom, in accordance with US policy; their teachers were hailed as 'apostles of civilisation'.486 Three years later, Rev. George Nash Morton and Edward Lane of the Presbyterian Church in the Southern States founded the Colégio Internacional, or Colégio Morton, in Campinas. This school supported the ideas of free thought and free worship while employing the teaching practices of the United States' 'common schools', including the study of the sciences and humanities using the 'intuitive approach'. João Alberto's piece, one of only two in this magazine, compared the development of the Brazilian and US education systems. He contended that education in the United States was inextricably linked to decentralisation since it was originally created at the local level.498 João Alberto, a critic of monarchical centralization, praised the fact that 'North-Americans' had experienced freedom for a long time and 'live happily under a purely democratic regime, whereas we, Brazilians, succumb to the weight of an oppressive regime which annihilates, sterilises, and kills everything'. In addition, in the United States, both the ruling class and regular citizens

In 1881, ex-Confederates founded the Colégio Piracicabano in the city of the same name in the province of São Paulo. Martha Watts, a missionary and educator from the United States, founded this girls' school in Brazil when her family arrived in March of that year.

In Brazil, public measures for girls' education began with the statute of October 15, 1827, which established 'basic schools in all cities, villages, and the most populated parts of the Empire'.489 In theory, this statute aimed to democratize access to public education for all genders. In practice, schools were scarce throughout the Empire, inadequately equipped, and placed in urban areas far from where the majority of the population resided. Surprisingly, the majority of the very few educated adults did not attend school as children because domestic teaching was the norm in aristocratic homes.490
The Protestant missionaries introduced the U.S. educational model and logic to Brazil through their schools in the 1870s and 1880s, and it had a long-lasting impact on Brazilian liberal circles.491 Not only did many Paulista liberal elites committed to Brazil's economic, political, and cultural rehabilitation study or teach at Protestant schools, but they also sent their kids to be educated under the impact of this practical and scientific approach to education.492 Furthermore, the instructional method of Protestant schools extended beyond primary schooling. In 1891, Colégio Mackenzie's School of Engineering became the first private higher education institution.493 Early in the republican years, President Prudente de Moraes Barros asked radical liberal republican Francisco Rangel Pestana to develop the first project to change the school system in São Paulo, popularizing U.S. teaching methods. Pestana drew inspiration from both the 'training schools' of the United States and the Colégio Piracicabano.494 Overall, the politically influential Masonic republicans established an educational, cultural, and political discourse based on teaching methods and curricula used in the United States.

The decade of the 1870s also provided liberal Paulista thinkers with another avenue for political activism. 

The Almanach Litterário de São Paulo, produced by Portuguese typographer José Maria Lisboa, served as a platform for Paulistas to advocate for political and social change in Brazil.495 From there, certain members of the organization addressed their fellow provincials, encouraging them to import specific components of American society, the most important of which were the decentralization of government, as seen in Chapter 2, and the education system, as noted above. The Salles brothers, sons of a large landowning family from Campinas dedicated to coffee farming, were among the Almanach's members and ardent contributors. João Alberto Salles, a US-trained engineer, and Manoel Campos Salles, a future Republican president, were discussed in the preceding chapter. Campos Salles' 1876 Almanach piece titled 'The Cult of Science' highlighted the importance of a democratic education system in American society. João Alberto, like many other philosophers at the period, first criticized Portuguese educational policy for the poor status of education under the Empire. He stated that 'we desire the school, because it is [this institution] which has to make the revolution'.497 The Salles brothers, and the Almanach group as a whole, saw the U.S. model of education as the key point of reference for Brazil. For João Alberto, education was the most effective way to bring about social and political revolution in the country.