The main objective of this text is to present a historical reading of the document entitled Educators' Manifesto (1959) under a context taken as a synthesis of tensions and with a qualitative potential to overcome the contradictions of the so called national-development model, based on industrialization, adopted between 1930 and 1964. This analysis mainly stresses the 1950s. As a result, we expect to have achieved a better historical understanding of the process of change or of the structural movement lived by the Brazilian society in that period, in order to clarify the different educational and social projects that were then in conflict.
History of education; Public school; Universal educational thinking