School represents, due to the things that it does and the duties that it has, a type of liturgy. Viewing the school as a ritual requires the observation of the internal movements that make up the daily school routine, as well as an understanding of the protocols of actions designed to be inserted into institutional practices. In this sense, the children in line, the organization of the space into classes arranged into different grades, the construction of timetables to accommodate the different subjects and disciplines that make up the curriculum, the interaction between the teacher and the students within the space of the classroom, the rows of desks, the topic registered on the blackboard, all of this indicates actions and movements that are included in what we understand as being school life. This investigation addresses some examples of ways of constituting the school liturgy, by means of working with primary sources regarded as appropriate for ascertaining aspects of daily school life: public education codes, textbooks for training teachers, primary schools' reading books, teaching and inspection reports. The period that the documentation is limited to covers the second half of the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century. We seek to make use of tangled traces, capable of providing us with elements to reconstitute rituals existing in Brazilian schools - more specifically those in the State of São Paulo - and Portuguese schools. With the understanding that it deals with a dialogue of the Portuguese-Brazilian world, the proposal was to establish fields of approximation between the realities of the countries - with an apology for the change in the meanings of the words due to the long period of time. It is not exactly intended to achieve a comparison between the two realities - Brazilian and Portuguese -, but merely to examine reports, overlapping traces and seeking to identify evidence that shows us not just how school's day-to-day routine used to be, but to imagine what it must have been like.
primary school; school culture; ritual; liturgy; history of education