The Italian education in São Paulo: between Vargas and Mussolini

Abstract

Many Italian immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century in São Paulo were concerned with the education of their children and saw in access to formal education a means of social advancement. Since the late nineteenth century, isolated schools and charities spread through the neighborhoods of the city, especially around the factories. However, emerging economic immigrants aspired to his descendants the opportunity to attend schools that made the front of the Paulista elite education through the adoption of European models of education. Industrialists, traders and diplomats articulated themselves in Brazil and Italy for the promotion of Italian high culture among the youth of the community based in São Paulo.In the fascist political regime was the prevailing discourse of internationalization, which included immigrants and their descendants as members of the great Italian nation. Thus, cultural and educational institutions around the world have come to serve as points of irradiation political creed gestated by Mussolini. In Brazil, during the Estado Novo foreign institutions were intensively monitored and some even closed. The Department of Political and Social Order acted in the name of ideals and nationalizing agents identified in the circulation of ideas and teaching practices that break with such ideals. Thus, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, spaces and subjects were on the verge of crossing and ruptures between two projects, one side of Vargas and other expansionist fascist cultural policy. (AU)