Debates on the moral education, character, and conduct of the individual at the first decades of the twenties and their repercussions nowadays

Abstract

Moral education periodically resurfaces in the agenda of the Brazilian educational policies, which is a discussion that stems from pedagogical proposals of the first decades of the twentieth century. The likes of eugenicists, pedagogues, politicians, sanitarianists, and hygienists have yearned to moralize the social body; they feared that society would “degenerate” due to poor housing and hygiene conditions, as well as to the bad habits of the population – vices, venereal diseases, etc. This article aims to problematize some of these proposals, analyzing how studies referring to biological heredity and socio-cultural determinismo guided the pedagogical proposals at the beginning of the last century; when the first steps to build a national education system in Brazil were taken. For that purpose, we made an historical analysis of the debates in the First National Conference of Education, held in Curitiba in 1927, as well as other documents from that period. The research contributes to explain the debate on the educational proposals for the moral formation of individuals’ character and conduct. Our analyses revealed that, before considering a national school system, specialists debated the type of subject educational action would target, which shows that the need to moralize habits from childhood was top priority at the time and guided the debate on education. These debates oscillated between biogenetic determinismo and the influence of the environment as a determinant aspect of human conduct. Echoes of these discussions still resonate in the present; in the proposals for moral formation that today circulate between progressivist ideas and liberal-conservatism.