Usina Itaicí – Mato Grosso : história, trabalho e educação (1897-1930)

Abstract

This research has as object of study the Usina Itaicí, a sugar production plant created at the end of the 19th century in the municipality of Santo Antonio de Leverger - MT. This research was developed through the research group history of education and memory at the Federal University of Mato Grosso.The central point of this thesis is to analyze education in a broader way, punctuating the elements present in the scope of school and non-school education. For this, we chose to use the categories space, schooling and work, for allowing look at education in its plurality. This was possible through the historiographic operation that allowed to locate, select, gather, collate, analyze, finally, appropriate a corpus of documents that contain important information about educational actions made in the context of the Itaici plant. In the field of school education, emphasis was placed on the schooling of children, seeking to highlight the creation, organization and functioning of the Itaicí School as a primary education institution, priored by private enterprise and later by public administration, as well as , we look back at some aspects of their school culture. This study also seeks to reflect on the perspectives of the history of education beyond school based on the sharing of knowledges and actions directed to the educability of men, women and children for the coexistence in the hierarchical molds of the clientelistic society, that acted on the basis of the clientelistic practices thinking about the adequacy of families to work on sugar production in an industrial way and the way of life in the plant. It is taken as reference in this investigation the years from 1897 to 1930, which explains why it is the peak of the operation of the plant, without disregarding that this cut is the threshold of the Republic, moment of much political tension in the state. This scenario certainly influenced the formation of society that had to coexist with the implantation of Republican ideas in the face of strongly oligarchic practices. The thesis on education within and outside school started from the perspective of cultural history with a focus on the concepts of representations and appropriations in order to understand the educational dimension produced in the plant in a plural form, observing how the formation took place values, habits, customs and behaviors. We turn to the concept of practices considering the ways in which people used practices and places of power. From the historiographical operation, the historical narrative points out the variety of representations, appropriations and practices that shaped the ways of understanding education in the context of the first republic in the state of Mato Grosso, and specifically, in the universe of Itaicí Power Plant. In this construction, it was observed that the historical context based on the coronel culture delineated principles, standards and behaviors that influenced the formation of social actors through the cultural practices present in the plant, observable in the production of space, in the culture of work, in the practices of punishment and resistance, as well as in schooling of children.