The "abandoned childhood" in Santa Isabels agricultural asylum: rural instruction and child labor (1880-1886)

Abstract

The present work deals with the creation of the Association for the Protection of the Abandoned Childhood, in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, in the 1880s, and with the Associations proposals for promoting the primary education and the agricultural training destined to the so-called poor children of the Empire. To that effect, the debates on the diffusion of the elementary education, and the work and the updating of the social control policies were taken into account. These policies were present among the concerns and objectives of the Associations founding partners and of the politicians of the Empire and they signaled to an asylum-based education project, in which the agricultural economy figures as the base of the national development. To understand those issues, the article focuses on the analysis of Santa Isabels Agricultural Asylum, created by the Association and inaugurated in 1886. The study attempts to characterize: the Asylums architecture, the buildings and external areas; the children sent there, their geographical origin, sex and social condition; and the teaching offered, the knowledge transmitted, disciplines of religious character, access to prizes as a source of stimulation and work in the field. The work concludes with the statement that the attempt of establishing a policy of moral and religious education, allied to the elementary education and the teaching focused on the rural work, with the intention of preserving a dependent workforce in the agricultural farms, was the foundation and main objective of the Association for the Protection of the Abandoned Childhood.