The ideas of civilized man veiculated in didactic books of moral and civic education in the civil-military dictatorship

Abstract

Moral and Civic Education (EMC), as a specific discipline of school culture, received greater notoriety in Brazil during the years of the Civil-Military Dictatorship (1964-1985), and its textbooks were significant vehicles for the dissemination of controls and values to be internalized by the new Brazilian generation. In this article we present a research based on six textbooks of the discipline of EMC that circulated in Brazilian schools in the context of the authoritarian regime: Fontoura (1970); Michalany and Ramos (1970); Moschini, Costa and Mussumeci (1970); Andrade (1971); Santos (1974); and Siqueira and Bertolin (1981). The aim was to identify which civilized man's ideals were propagated in the EMC textbooks. For the organization and analysis of the data, we use as a theoretical reference the discussions about school discipline established by Viñao Frago (2008), Chervel (1990), Goodson (1995) and Cuesta Fernandez (1997); regarding the textbook as a source for a writing of history, we have used the studies promoted by Choppin (2004), Bittencourt (2004), Munakata (2016) and Moreira and Diaz (2017); and for the interpretation of the precepts of civility we consider the theoretical contributions of Elias (1980; 1994a; 1994b; 2006). As a result, civilized man should (self) control his impulses by considering the codes of moral, religious, patriotic and civic behavior and sentiment present in the EMC books, particularly in the content on the formation of the individual's personality (values, virtues, rights, duties, habits and customs) and on the constitution of social configurations (family, school, church, armed forces, national state).