Coursebooks and Estado Novo: an ideological project

Abstract

This article aims at reflecting about the ethnical and cultural diversity's place regarding the educational policies focused on the nationalization of education and its interference in the coursebooks contents during the Estado Novo dictatorial regime. This period is marked by meaningful interventions in education, with the promotion of actions that aim at increasing the State's dominance over this area. It's in this scope that the National Comission of Coursebooks is created, which has the objective of checking the ideological and methodological content of the school manuals. We are going to demonstrate how the educational area was important to legitimize the then president Geultio Vargas' power. However, the overall outlook undergoing during Vargas era was unfavourable to the diverse forms of ethnical and cultural expressions existing in Brazil, regarding the reflection of an education that ranked the school contents and kept an ideological point of view marked by the consolidation of the national unity idea.