Education and Modernization of the Sertão – Municipality, School, City

Abstract

Historiography, even regional, tended to refer to the Northeastern Sertão as non-history, where nature and human life were consumed in a resumed cycle of survival. In contrast, and as interdisciplinary studies and recent historiography have shown, Sertão integrates the history of the Northeast in a sequence of development cycles of the Brazilian economy and society. But it also has a life of its own, in demographic, economic, ethnographic, educational, sociocultural aspects. The farm was the main structure of ownership, power and economic and social organization. In contrast to nomadism and wandering, villages and places of fixed commerce emerged. Municipality, particularly under the modality of municipality and urbanism, is part of the modernization of the Sertão, where education brought a sense of progress through written acculturation, literacy and schooling in new ways and destinations of life. In this study, after framing the history of the Sertão, a line of progress is presented that includes economic, agricultural and industrial development, written acculturation, urbanism, municipalism. Following, a brief history of the municipalities of Delmiro Gouveia and Paulo Afonso is presented.