Rural Primary Education in the City of Apucarana-Paraná (1940-1990)

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the history of rural education in Apucarana-Paraná, between the decades of 1940 and 1990, from the contributions of the educational historiography about the subject and the documentary and iconographic sources located in the school collections of the city. The research in the area of school institutions has been concerned with recognizing the local peculiarities and the subjects involved in the schooling process. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the rural primary schools in the Apucarana's region, reconstitute their organization and means of creation, institutionalization and cessation in a context of (re) occupation of the territory by migrants and immigrants. In this reality, the rural school allowed the expansion of primary schooling, for the population living in rural areas, due the process of modernization of the state of Paraná. To reconstruct the reality of a city's rural education can be explained by the identity representation of that territory provided with culture, and this reality can be represented by the school collections; For this research, some locations were visited and it was elected the fields of research: "State School Alberto Santos-Dumont” where it was located the "Regional Training School Pestalozzi"; The “State School Nilo Cairo”, building which stores the documents of the "Secondary Training School Ovídio Decroly"; The “Rural State School Manuel Ribas", old "Apucarana's Rural Workers School" where is preserved most of the documents from Apucarana's rural areas primary schools; and the “Regional Department of Education" where it has been found general documentary sources of the city, such as minute books, teachers' records, students enrollment, and land possession documents, photographs, land registers, textbooks, and so on. The research resulted in the mapping of 90 municipal rural schools, two Training Schools and one rural workers school and the trajectory of these (construction, institutionalization, cessation and replacement) in the historical, political, geographical and economic context of the city of Apucarana - Paraná (1940-1990).