School as a social environment: the integration of history and geography in fundamental education and personal experiences

Abstract

This article was developed around the ideas of some authors, especially John Dewey, to whose theoretical reference the thought of Anísio Teixeira, among others, was added. This allowed us to understand the current educational reality, considering the Dewey’s experiences in Laboratory School of Chicago and those of Teixeira in Escola Parque Salvador, Bahia. Our interest, in this opportunity, is to investigate if such educational experiences dialogue with the reality lived in Elementary School, specifically in the integration between the History and Geography subjects. We obtained with this research the perception of how training should not only be aimed at obtaining and increasing content from a “mass” perspective, but rather that the formative proposals should favor individual development, making people able to think and reflect broadly including in the roll of their interests the issues that affect the society in which they live. This is what we were able to assess when analyzing the work developed, based on the integration of the subjects under consideration in this study. We also considered the need for school not to be seen as a parallel life in relation to social life or seen as an idealistically isolated experience, but that young people should live their lives in an independent and autonomous way in any situation where they are, relating the external experiences with those they obtain in the school, being the latter better organized and selected for the sake of their training for the common good.