CUORE FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC (BETWEEN THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY)

Abstract

Between the final decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, Italian books were distributed and circulated among immigrants and their descendants. Syllabaries, reading books, religious books, arithmetic books, history books, geography books, and song books, among others that followed the current Italian curriculum, crossed the Atlantic to be adopted in Italian schools in São Paulo. The object of investigation of this article is the centennial and still published Cuore, by Edmondo De Amicis, whose first edition dates to 1886, in Italy, and thus became a great publishing success, gained translations and was adopted in schools in São Paulo. The intention of this article is to understand, on the one hand, the educational policies that regulated the production of schoolbooks for Italian schools abroad, and on the other hand, the motivations that led to the circulation and distribution to Italian and São Paulo schools, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Anchored in the references of Cultural History and History of Education and mobilizing the conceptual corpus, especially of Chartier (1994, 1996, 1998, 2004) regarding production and representation, the procedures, instruments, sources and directions of analysis were defined. The documentary analysis takes as privileged sources, in addition to Cuore, the press, consuls' reports, official letters, dispatches, ministerial circulars and the yearbook of Italian schools and public education in São Paulo.