MONTEIRO LOBATO AND THE NEW SCHOOL IDEAL: A SCHOOL MODEL IN THE SÍTIO DO PICA-PAU AMARELO

Abstract

This study shows that, based on the children’s work by Monteiro Lobato’s (1882-1948), the author dialogued and shared in the theoretical-methodological premises of the New School ideal. His approach was expressed in works of literature written for children, produced in the first half of the Twentieth Century, when this movement began to spread around the country. We provide the basis for this proposition by discoursing on the contact established by Monteiro Lobato with the theoretical assumptions of this theory, and show, in Serões de Dona Benta from 1935, how the educational practice of “Sitio do Pica-Pau Amarelo” made use of the educational models proposed by the New School. We observe that education played an important role in the moral and intellectual formation of Brazilian children, due to the need to prepare workers for industries and citizens for the Republic. To ensure this formation, another pedagogical model was necessary. Monteiro Lobato had contact with the new pedagogical stream of thought, when he published articles that revealed this stream in the magazine Revista do Brazil, with the reading of books by renovative authors, and through the friendship he maintained with Brazilian educators connected to the stream of thought, such as Anísio Teixeira. We note that Lobato shared the ideas of the New School through the reading of his children’s books. He projected a school in which the child (his infant characters) actively took part in their learning process, and were free to discover their interests, and deepen them when desired. In this scenario, it would be the role of the teacher (Dona Benta) to provide the necessary means for the children to learn through games and imagination. Thus, scientific contents would became essential to the child’s training; learning would be initiated by experimentation and observation, using the five senses, and the children’s experiences in their day-to-day lives, and in this process, the school would become an indispensable tool for learning.