This article presents data on school organization and curricula for primary schools in the Hansa colony in Santa Catarina, founded in 1897 in Brazil. It has been based on an analysis of documents belonging to the Colonizing Company of Hamburg [Companhia Colonizadora Hamburguesa]. The results show particularities such as German-medium teaching and a curriculum focusing on Calculus and the study of the German language and culture in subjects such as Reading, Writing, Poetry, Singing, Religion and Latin. There were, however, subjects such as Portuguese and History, which addressed Brazilian issues. In their early years, these institutions maintained pedagogical aspects that mark them as typical expressions of the ethnic school phenomenon: the German schools [Deutsche Schulen]. They met the need for schools, and were based on a set of educational practices that were ethnic in nature, blending foreign cultural aspects with other aspects from the Brazilian context. The use of the German language was an essential ethnic indicator. Understanding of these school institutions in Brazilian educational history is placed within parameters of relations between curriculum and culture, taking the ethnic issue as the core factor in the analysis of social processes.
german immigration; community schools; educational practice; ethnic