Death in students’ everyday lives in 1930’s Brazil

Abstract

This article analyses the representations of death in different articles published in Vida Escolar («School Life») – a pedagogical journal produced by a student body of the city of Campo Grande, Mato Grosso state, central Western Brazil. Published by the Visconde de Taunay School, Vida Escolar circulated in the 1930s (between 1934 and 1936), and we analysed nineteen of the 22 published issues – archived at the Regional Documentation Center of the Federal University of Grande Dourados – for this article. This research helps to fill the gaps in knowledge surrounding the themes of death and childhood in the history of education in Brazil, especially in the central Western region. It reveals that the representations of death presented by and for children are closely related to civism, religiosity and medical science. Indeed, analysis of the journal Vida Escolar shows that death, as an interdiction, is related to the advancement of medicine; at the beginning of the 20th century, with the development of medical science, death came to be seen as synonymous with failure, as an absence of «scientificity». As emphasized in Vida Escolar, it is the job of medicine to prevent death – this was the message given to the students, future doctors.

Keywords

• death
• representation
• child
• pedagogical press
• history of education