O artigo investiga os modelos ideológicos e institucionais de assistência à infância idealizados e promovidos por Arthur Moncorvo Filho no começo do século XX. Este médico brasileiro expressamente associava criança e assistência infantil à nação, defendendo o controle, por parte do governo federal, de todas as instituições destinadas a proteger a infância. Ele acreditava que o poder público deveria assumir o papel reservado aos pais das crianças pobres, a fim de protegê-las da miséria e da delinqüência prevalecentes nas cidades brasileiras. Para Moncorvo Filho, as crianças possuíam um valor intrínseco, pois representavam a matéria-prima a partir da qual a futura força de trabalho poderia ser moldada. Por meio das instituições que organizou, esperava instaurar um modelo institucional de assistência à infância, a partir do qual o governo poderia criar um sistema nacional centralizado de proteção aos menores carentes. This essay explores the ideological and institutional models for child welfare created and promoted by Dr. Arthur Moncorvo Filho in early twentieth-century Brazil. Moncorvo Filho explicitly connected children and child welfare with the nation and promoted the idea that the national government should centralize control over existing child welfare institutions. In so doing, he asserted that the government should assume the role of parent to the nations poor children to protect them from the poverty and delinquency then prevalent in Brazil's cities. In his model, children had intrinsic value because they were the raw material from which the future labor force could be molded. Through the institutions he had created he hoped to set up a institutional model of comprehensive child welfare upon which the government could draw to create a centralized system of national child welfare
When the Portuguese Inquisition officially began in the year 1536, Brazil inhabited only the extreme margins of the Portuguese Empire and elicited little concern from the Inquisitors in Lisbon. Royal authority only became permanently established in 1549 in the person of Tomé de Sousa as governor-general of Brazil. The establishment of ecclesiastical authority over Brazil occurred about the same time through the padroado real, or royal patronage. The Order of Christ (whose grand master was the king himself) and the Mesa da Consciência e Ordens administered the royal patronage in the colony. The Church in Brazil remained directly subordinate to the archbishopric of Funchal on Madeira until the first diocese was established in Bahia in 1551. Pernambuco did not become a diocese until 1676 when Bahia became an archbishopric. Throughout the entire colonial period Bahia remained the only archbishopric in Brazil, although six bishoprics were eventually established. For Pernambuco, this meant that until 1676 the highest local ecclesiastical officials were the vicars general, the rectors of the Jesuit College, and the priors of the Benedictine, Franciscan, and Carmelite convents.
The child does not only belong to the family .... Child rearing is no longer purely a question of family order, it embraces a multitude of interests for the social order .... The problem of childhood is the greatest national dilemma.Brazilian hygienist Dr. Alfredo Ferreira de Magalhães proclaimed his view of child welfare to an elite audience of medical, legal, political, military, and business leaders during the opening ceremonies at the 1922 First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Childhood held in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time in Brazil, children had become a distinct focus of teachers, lawyers, military leaders, politicians, police, priests, judges, journalists, and novelists who struggled to incorporate liberal and positivistic ideas into public policies and institutions. Members of all classes of Brazilian society had cared for children and had lamented high rates of infant mortality well before the turn of the century. The 1920s movement, however, differed significantly from previous approaches to child welfare in Brazil. This was the first time that elites from such a wide variety of professions and positions of power insisted that the state assume responsibility for funding, implementing, and enforcing child welfare legislation and institutions.
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