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“Mr. Director of Public Education”: an essay for the analysis of school official letters (State of Santa Catarina, Brazil, 1917)

Abstract

This article broaches administrative practices and office routines amidst Public Education Reform started in 1911 in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. For this purpose, a series of documents consisting of office letters sent, in 1917, by two teachers to the Director of Education, Horácio Nunes Pires. All the letters analyzed contain requests for the provision of physical structures to the schools were such teachers worked. It is interesting to observe how their demands were set up and how they were combined into the operations (Certeau, 1985). In order to understand the practices in view, the categories of strategies and tactics were utilized (Certeau, 2009). These categories are used to understand the maneuvering of the individuals. This allows to look at their efforts in relation with their functional and political procedures. The goal is to pinpoint the actions of specific individuals placed in the heart of public education bureaucracy in the State of Santa Catarina. Such bureaucracy is understood as breeding ground in organizing practices and maneuvers led by different persons. The assumption is that both teachers produce operations from their individual standpoint in the bureaucratic machinery of the education system. The conclusion is that educational bureaucracy is a field of dispute constrained by several operations, within which the operations of different individuals are made visible.

School management; Santa Catarina; Correspondence; Educational bureaucracy

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