The laicization of education in the transition from the Empire to the Republic in Brazil: lay or religious teaching?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study deals with the process of secularization of education in Brazil. It aims to analyze the discussion on the nature of lay teaching, in the chronological arc between the end of the Empire and the beginnings of the Republic. It is a bibliographic research that discusses the political, economic, social and cultural transformations that Brazil went through and that had repercussions on the historical conformation of a secular status. The results point to the presence, since the Empire, of conceptions of lay teaching whose legal foundations were applied to educational laicization in the early years of the Republic. They show that the proposals of secularism presented by Rui Barbosa were central in defending the American legal matrix that was included in the 1891 Constitution, despite clashes with the positivist interpretation of secularism and the Catholic Church. On the other hand, followers of positivism conceived secularism based on the French matrix, lending it anti-clerical or anti-religious connotations.