Representações de estudantes na imprensa estudantil secundarista em Campo Grande/MT: o vida escolar e o ginásio, nas décadas de 1930 e 1940

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to analyze the representations of students in the secondary school student press in the city of Campo Grande, in the south of the former state of Mato Grosso, during the 1930s and 1940s. The documentary corpus consists of 57 editions of the periodicals Vida Escolar: Orgão dos Estudantes de Campo Grande (1934-1936), Vida Escolar: Orgão dos Alunos do Internato Osvaldo Cruz (1937), and O Ginásio: Orgão dos Alunos do Ginásio Municipal Dom Bosco (1937-1945). We seek to examine the socially and culturally disseminated representations of students. As a methodological procedure for analysis, we built a systematized database from the digitization of the periodicals using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, a necessary procedure given the breadth of content within the sources. The research examines the materiality of these periodicals, their textual and visual content, as well as the themes addressed, organized into six thematic axes: youth culture; school institution; cinema and education; Christian culture; Mato Grosso; and civic, moral, and physical education. Guided by the theoretical framework of the New Cultural History, we investigate what were the representations of students conveyed in the periodicals produced by private secondary schools, therefore, by the elite of Campo Grande. To this end, we analyze the students’ areas of activity in the production of the periodicals and in the literary guilds Castro Alves and Padre José de Anchieta, as well as the activities that comprised youth sociability: civic-literary sessions, sports practices, student caravans, and humorous sections. We argue the thesis that the representations of students were partly shaped by institutional control: although the printed materials showed student organization and participation aiming for autonomy and configured themselves as spaces for youth expression, they also revealed disciplinary and formative practices, highlighting the tensions between student autonomy and institutional surveillance. The analysis of materiality and authorship dynamics demonstrated that, between 1937 and 1942, student participation was majority in O Ginásio, but from 1943 onwards, with the change of subtitle to “Official Organ of the School”, the student voice was progressively silenced. In Vida Escolar, we identified phases of greater student protagonism. The activities of the literary guilds, reports of caravans, sports chronicles, and humorous sections revealed expressions of youth culture that, within the limits of an authorized freedom, produced representations of what it meant to be a student, conveyed between the ideal of the diligent, patriotic, and religious student more vigorously and, in minimal traces, more spontaneous and critical manifestations of school life. The writings on civic, moral, and physical education, conveyed in articles, speeches, and photographs of parades and physical activities, projected a holistic education aligned with the nationalist ideals of the Vargas Era and Christian doctrine. However, in the play of representations, other youth groups that made up the population scenario of Campo Grande, such as young women, the indigenous population, immigrants, Black and mixed-race people, were silenced or represented in a stereotyped manner, revealing the elitist and exclusionary character of secondary education and the student press itself that was analyzed.