Physical education at the Brazilian Education Association: modern practices of body education in Rio de Janeiro city from 1928 to 1935

Abstract

Aims: This research aimed to understand how Associação Brasileira de Educação (ABE -Brazilian Education Association) constituted visibility strategies for "body education" in Rio de Janeiro city. Method: As for methodology, we conducted documentary research whose primary sources were reports and minutes of ABE, newspapers, magazines, and books. Results: Our time framework was between 1928 and 1935, a period when ABE organized festivities called "Education Weeks" whose target group was students of Rio de Janeiro schools and their parents. Conclusion: It concluded that ABE managed to mobilize schools to demonstrate models of body practices consistent with the principles of a modern school. By alternating strategies such as lectures, courses, public exhibitions, ABE tried to print in the city the auspices of a modern and sanitized life which had not reached significant portions of the Brazilian population in a country that still claimed a more substantial state intervention in the social field. Similarly, public education was incipient and its project was still being drafted in a debate that involved a multitude of voices and agents with their interests. Between tradition and modernity, it would be difficult to organize discourses in two opposite poles. Finally, as in the discourses, in the field of practices, the mere polarization between tradition and modernity definitively does not explain the alliances and conflicts inherent to the various actors in the construction of greater visibility of "body education" by ABE.