Debates about teaching in Sao Paulo elementary schools in the first years of the 20th century

Abstract

public and italian private elementary schools were meant to make students literate in portuguese. The conflict created at this point was due to the range of places in the Italian Peninsula where the Italians came from, and their respective languages. The subsidized Italian schools advocated that the teaching of italian and portuguese should happen simultaneously, which did not always happen due to the language teachers’ ethnic origins. The sources used in the present research consist of news articles written in italian, found in some newspapers that circulated around the city, as well as reports from school inspectors who visited the elementary schools in the capital city, among other documents in the collections of the Public Archive of the State of São Paulo. Among the authors who formed the basis for this research are Trento (2002), Pereira (2010), Cruz (2013), due to their daily life description of the city of São Paulo; and Italian authors such as Civra (2002) and Salvetti (2002), when addressing the situation of italian schools built overseas; among others. Up to the moment, it is possible to reach the conclusion that those children who attended elementary schools in the neighborhoods encompassed by the study would learn portuguese or italian despite all the diversities they encountered.