Delmiro Gouveia e o processo educacional desenvolvido no núcleo fabril da Pedra, no Sertão de Alagoas. (1902 – 1926)

Abstract

This text is the final report of a research effort on Delmiro Gouveia as industry chief and “civilizing” agent for the Vila da Pedra, in the Alagoas Hinterland. Covering the period from 1902 through 1926, when Gouveia and, after him, his descendants, were active first in the skin trade and then in the building of a hydroelectric plant and the incorporation of a thread factory, this study analyses the process of urbanization and factorization of the rural workers of the Sertão of Alagoas and the neighboring states. This process of transplanting the rural masses into the industrial way of life, lauded by many as a “civilizing process” for attending to the mind-frame of the European and American proletariat taken as a model, and which I’d rather call “educational”, is viewed from the perspective of the educational policies effectively implanted at Pedra, which in their turn are viewed in the light of the social sciences and the pedagogy then thought and practiced in Brazil. Delmiro Gouveia is thus viewed as one who, by building up an industrial complex, was responsible for kick starting a short-lived cycle of industrial development and urbanization which is, nevertheless, described up until now by visitors and students of the phenomenon (intellectuals, journalists, politicians and authors of almost every ideological bent) as a model of progressive and civilized (humane) capitalism worthy of admiration and imitation all over Brazil then and now. This study pursues these goals through the analysis of School principles and practices as well as the imposition of new habits and of the ways of making them effective, trying to understand their effects on the Hinterland and its inhabitants in the Old Republic against the backdrop of the republican educational ideals, the prevailing concepts regarding the hinterland man and country and the processes of schooling in Alagoas in the first decades of the 20th Century.