“THE FAILURE OF NEW SCHOOL REFORM”: ATALIBA DE OLIVEIRA INTERPRETING THE PAULISTA SCHOOL RENOVATION (THE 1930s AND 1940s)

Abstract

Under the perspective guided by Darnton (1986), this article aims to capture the interpretations made by Ataliba Antonio de Oliveira about the new school movement. It is about a teacher from São Paulo who followed and resisted closely and from within the onslaughts and attempts at pedagogical renewal in progress in the São Paulo school system. By writing more than two hundred chronicles, interpreting among other themes the initiatives of the Escolanovistas in São Paulo, Ataliba de Oliveira pointed out the errors that characterized “the failure of new school reform”. After inventorying and analyzing these chronicles, this article intends to answer the question: How did Ataliba de Oliveira interpret the new school movement and the tentatives of inserting this pedagogical doctrine in the Paulista school apparatus between 1930 and 1940? The comparative logical structures the most of the chronicles, and through them, are revealed his most scathing criticism to the reform, the reformers, and the educational consequences of those actions. He also revealed the patterns that he intended to preserve. Taken together, the chronicles of Ataliba de Oliveira made up the interpretation that “the failure of new school reform” occurred because its apologists did not consider the data and situations of the Paulista school reality, nor the conditions faced by teachers and students in the educational task.