A educação brasileira na primeira onda laica: do Império à República

Abstract

This book is situated at the crossroads of Sociology and History, focusing on the educational field in Brazil, particularly in its process of autonomization of the religious field. It analyzes the formation of the first secular wave formed along with the National State and culminated in the legislation of the Republican Provisional Government and in the Constitution of 1891. Two are the main issues addressed in the book. (I) How was the Constitution of 1891 able to determine the secularity of public education in a country where, for four centuries, the Catholic Church was politically embedded in the State. (II) How did secularity, once instituted, recede, and Religious Education returned to public schools. The book contains answers to the first question (the author identified the slow formation during the Empire of a conception of secular education, and the promulgation of partial measures, which gradually reduced the presence of the official religion in the institutions Education); and propose answers to the second question (the peculiar form of separation betweem State and the Church in republican Brazil created conditions for a policy of reciprocal collaboration before the Constitution of 1934, where this expression was "consecrated".