Teacher Maria Gil and the stones in the way: school culture early days in Cônego Marinho, MG

Abstract

Since the 1930s, the government worried about schooling of rural population, then the majority. Rural education, however, didn’t fulfill expectations; it was founded on the curriculum aimed at urban school and unable to contain countryside–city exodus in the 1950s. As the countryside wasn’t emptied demographically, new generations has demanded education aimed at their needs. As another demand of social movements’, the educação do campo movement (education for the countryside) became a public policy to institute a model of education aimed at rural population. This work has addressed these questions in studying a private rural school in its transition to be public. It relies upon interviews with the teacher-administrator of the “Escolinha rural” (rural little school) in Candeal district, municipality of Cônego Marinho, MG. The starting point was the following question: what kind of school did she set up and how did she conduct schooling? The aim was to dialogue with rural life memories of what could be called as informal community-private school culture. The research used oral history as a guiding method to produce sources; besides, it’s drawn on document sources. Results analysis indicates “Escolinha rural” has little to do with the rural school substituted by the educação do campo movement. Its existence did not depend on the state. Still, just as rural education imposed on the rural school a curriculum foreign to the demands of its audience, the “little rural school” was subsumed by a model of escola do campo whose curriculum was strange to it.