Abstract
This article results from a broader study which aimed to examine deaf people’s literacy in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil, from 1950 to 1970. The article’s goal is, more specifically, to understand the process of decentralization of deaf education/literacy in Brazil, as well as the consequent creation of the first literacy classes for deaf children in Espírito Santo, with regard to the political and administrative aspects of this process. It adopts historical research, as well as documents/texts, as the central object of analysis. It builds on the conception of history proposed by Marc Bloch and on the Bakhtinian perspective on language to understand texts/documents as an enunciation produced by subjects in their time. We conclude that the Campaign for Brazilian Deaf People’s Education was fundamental to enable the economic and social project aimed at decentralizing schooling, as well as to ensure that a greater number of deaf people, until then excluded from the constitutional right to education, could learn the country’s official language, which was literacy’s central goal at the time. Decentralization of deaf education in Espírito Santo, in turn, has actually taken place, but it has largely depended on partnerships between public and private institutions. If, on the one hand, these partnerships have postponed schooling offer as a right, on the other hand, they have enabled the concrete conditions for the education of a group of people until then excluded from this process.
Deaf education; Special education; Decentralization