Disability, education and work at the 1ª National Conference on Education (1927)

Abstract

The aim of this research is to examine the issue of education and disability related to the world of work in the 1920s and its current reflections. For this reason, the theory and methodology of the Standardization Council increases in perspective to the field of History of Education and Studies of Labor and Education. As empirical materiality, the 1st National Conference on Education (I CNE), held in 1927, in the city of Curitiba, and national decrees and laws contemporary concerning the social insertion of the disabled into the world of work were listed. The analytical election of the I CNE stems from the fact that it was in this event that the nineteenth-century Brazilian's educability was debated for the first time at the national level - according to the biosocial discourses based on Fordism and eugenics. Therefore, all individuals should contribute their workforce to the country's economic progress. Those whose education did not allow socio-economic emancipation via labor, they would be left to seclusion in specialized institutions such as special schools, asylums or leprosariums. The result of these discursivities point, today, to an education in which entry into the world of work still remains as the main intersocial and normality marker.