Intellectuals and language games: the discourse on Primary Education at the First National Education Conference (1927)

Abstract

This article has as its object the educational discourse enunciated in the First National Conference on Education (I CNE), organized by the Brazilian Association of Education (BAE), whose central theme was primary education. We start from the premise that BAE and its conferences were privileged places to project an intelligentsia authorized to talk about the problems of national education. The sources used refer to documents related to BAE and the I CNE, with emphasis on the 113 theses presented and discussed at the event. Regarding methodology, we have opted for an interlocution with the history of intellectuals and intellectual history, especially the contributions of linguistic contextualism to understand the language practiced in the I CNE. In the conclusions, we characterize educational discourse as a complex language, which has at its horizon the combination of concepts derived from the medical-sanitarian, civic-nationalist and religious discourses.