Helena Antipoff e a educação dos excepcionais: uma análise do trabalho como princípio educativo

Abstract

This article is about a historical research, based on documental sources, that follows the initial years of the Russian educator Helena Antipoff in Brazil, focusing on her activities in the educational system of the State of Minas Gerais, specially on the institutions that she built to attend children that were considered “exceptional”: the Sociedade Pestalozzi (1932), the Pavilhão de Natal (1934), the Instituto Pestalozzi (1935) and the Fazenda do Rosário (1940). It was investigated the selection mechanism of those children, characterized their profile and their history’s lives and finally analyzed the educational principle implemented in those institutions. It was used the concept of institutionalization understood as an instrument of dominant sections of society to conserve the current order, with the purpose to detect the different and isolate it, in a structure of social organization that produces contradiction. Once institutionalized, the formation of the children had for objective making them able for the labor market and the conducting wire of the activities was the work itself that replaced the studies and the play. This education aimed at to the production of the adaptation of the internees to an already-shaped social reality, being, therefore, the education only a path, indeed, to protect and conserve the social order.