As visitas das senhoras inspetoras e dos senhores inspetores: fiscalização do ensino nos colégios Nossa Senhora das Dores e Santo Antônio de São João del-Rei (1937-1964)

Abstract

The present research is part of the field of the historiography of education, aiming to examine the cultures and school practices that developed in the daily life of two confessional schools in São João del-Rei: Colégio Santo Antônio and Colégio Nossa Senhora das Dores, during the period from 1937 to 1964. Thus, I took as the research object the actions of the education inspectors working in these two São João institutions, considering them as important figures in the school configuration who directly influenced the daily practices experienced in the institutions and the school cultures constituted from these experiences. For this purpose, a series of documentary sets were used, fundamental for understanding different aspects of educational inspection, such as photographs, school newspapers, educational legislation, and administrative documents, especially the visit reports and inspection reports. The analyses focused on two periods of significant political and educational transformations in Brazil, covering the Estado Novo (1937–1945) and the Liberal-Democratic period (1946–1964). In each of these contexts, education was regarded as an important means for implementing distinct political projects, whether in the pursuit of forming national identity in the first period or valuing modernity in the second. Within this framework, the education inspectors acted within the studied school institutions as mediators of official determinations, materialized in bodies such as the Ministry of Education and the State Department of Education, and the school agents with whom they established relationships and bonds in the exercise of their functions. Beyond the school walls, it was possible to perceive that several inspectors developed professional careers related or unrelated to the educational field. Thus, while some worked as teachers and principals of São João schools, others pursued professional activities unrelated to education. In this way, many inspectors acted as lawyers, doctors, poets, writers, journalists, politicians, and pharmacists alongside their roles in school inspection, revealing the existence of intellectual sociability networks linking the inspectors with São João delRei’s literary and cultural associations.