New school and bolchevismo: exemplary episodes of an embate

Abstract

This article aims to study two episodes that occurred in the year 1937 and involved two signatories of the 1932 Manifesto: the educator Lourenço Filho and the well-known writer and educator Cecília Meireles. From the analysis of documents from the library of the National Council of Education and the Archive of the Supreme Federal Court, we bring some reflections on the closure of the Children's Library of the Moorish Pavilion directed by Cecília Meireles, accused of containing communist books and the impacts of this closure in the interior of the National Council of Education. In this episode, Lourenço Filho was accused by the newspaper O Povo of being communist precisely at a time when several people were arrested and investigated for alleged participation in the "Communist Intent" of 1935. The study analyzed primary sources and sought to confront with elements that pointed on the horizon closer and closer to the imposition of a State of Exception, which was set up in November 1937. In this sense, to understand these episodes as incidental scenes next to the main action of the complex reality of the period in which the New School posited itself as an alternative to the education of the period helps to problematize the complex reality of the 1930s and its outcomes.