TITLE:
The First Competitive Examinations for Teacher Selection: The Construction of Order without Didactics
AUTHORS:
Eurize Caldas Pessanh
KEYWORDS:
Teachers, Brazil, XIX Century, Exams, Didactics, Order
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.5 No.11,
June
24,
2014
ABSTRACT: The main purpose of this article is to analyze the competitive
examinations (concursos) developed for the hiring of public school teachers in
Brazil in the XIX century. An analysis of these competitive examinations
explaining the characteristics that the government required of people whom it
wished to hire as teachers represents an important approach to recovering the
history of teachers, which the history of teacher training programs and
Didactics itself seems to hide. The research on which this article is based has
the goal of discussing the history of the subject from the standpoint of analyzing
the exams for teacher selection, namely the content, skills, and
characteristics required of an individual to be hired as a teacher in a public
school. Considering that Didactics is the subject from which future
professionals acquire everything that they must know and the skills necessary
to be a professional, we dig into the history of this school subject related to
the history of Normal Schools (teacher training schools) in Brazil. We also
present the analysis of the competitive examinations for teacher selection,
considering the content, skills, and characteristics required for an individual
to be hired as a teacher in a public school. In our attempt to analyze this
process, we highlight legislative acts from 1809 to 1880 related to the hiring
of teachers in the Primitivo Moacyr collection. These sources contain the
respective exams and procedural documents for the following years: 1876, 1878, 1881,
1883, 1884, 1885, and 1886. All evidence appears to indicate that although the
competitive examinations, including all official apparatus, were conducted as a
matter of appearances only, their legitimacy was still provisional, as
suggested by both the procedural documents and some legal documents. We
conclude that the knowledge required to hire teachers was not Didactics but
behavior because, in countries such as Brazil where the “welfare state” was
never completely constructed, the school served as the first “reception room”
of the state, and the elementary school teacher, always a woman, was the “receptionist”.