Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 21 Issue 5

continued in school for longer until their mastery of curriculum contents became evident, the fact that they would not attend school as soon as they or their families felt they had already learned enough, or that they would not even advance further in learning, all of these were not necessarily considered as a political-educational problem. Only later will these occurrences be taken as distorting the path of students. It is therefore interesting to locate and understand the period in which these events are taken as a problem in educational talk, specialized discourses (by pediatricians and psychologists, for example) and political talk. In this article I intend, first, to make some theoretical-methodological remarks regarding the understanding of statistics and the words they mobilize. I also indicate the conceptualization used on what is established as a problem on the political agenda. Second, I present a brief discussion about the emergence of exams as a disciplinary practice in modern school, the exceptional nature that examination rituals assume in the path of students who attended school in the nineteenth century in Brazil, and the slow definition of the annual rhythm as characteristic of compulsory school. Next, I try to understand how, in the first republican decades, the adoption of serial school represented a slow and decisive process of change in school culture, in which the circulation of specialized discourses on the efficiency of teaching and normality standards in children’s school performance had a strongly prescriptive effect from practices and behaviors. Discussions regarding the importance of testing and the advantages of homogeneous class organization have engendered the widespread circulation of the belief that most individuals learn in the same way and at the same paces. Finally, I argue that the emergence of systematic, higher quality statistics on education – especially on enrollment, attendance and failure – after 1931 is a determining factor for the perception of educators and public managers of that period of what is now considered as “distortions” of students' learning paths, giving rise to a debate that emphasized students deficiencies as the cause of the phenomenon and which proposed actions in the scope of educational policy to make teaching more efficient, but not necessarily more adapted to the students’ needs. II. W ords, N umbers and P roblems: S ome T heoretical- M ethodological C onsiderations It is largely due to the emergence of more comprehensive and systematic educational statistics in the 1930s and 1940s that certain student movements through school grades can be perceived, analyzed and described as “distortions”. In this sense, the debates about failure have as a condition of possibility the production of statistics that allow to see the characteristics of students’ movement in the school, to evaluate the pace of learning and to establish, from this, normality standards. The production of numbers depends, however, on the prior establishment of categories that guide the collection of data, that is, it depends on the definition of certain social situations expressed in words. Annie Fouquet (1995, p.135-136) emphasizes that the statistician's job is to count what was previously socially defined and that “the numbers he publishes are the result of countless descriptions of reality often made without him, and of which he is only the counter”. These definitions and descriptions are the result of a historical process in which words take on specific meanings according to agreed upon and often not clearly expressed social uses. Thus, the work presented here dialogues with the assumptions of the History of Concepts, as proposed by Reinhart Koselleck. According to this author, without shared concepts there can be no society and, above all, there can be no unity of political action. On the other hand, concepts are based on socio-political systems that are far more complex than one is made to suppose from their understanding as linguistic communities organized under certain key concepts (Koselleck, 2006, p. 98). It also highlights, from this, that Social History therefore cannot dispense with the contributions of the History of Concepts, insofar as it endeavors to understand “from when the concepts can be rigorously used as indicators of political and social transformations of historical depth” (Koselleck, 2006, p.101). It is thus important to examine the semantic field of concepts in order to identify the use of terms in the social and political sphere by contemporaries and previous generations, as well as perceive the conflicts by the definition of terms, which aim to maintain or impose political and social positions. Beyond these observations, the socially ascribed importance of statistics has largely been based on the shared belief that they would present a neutral and objective description of reality , ensured by the universality of numbers and the unequivocal character of carefully chosen words in the composition of categories. However, statistics are far from having the neutrality that is often ascribed to them. Produced from defined purposes, by particular individuals and restricted to the possibility of presenting only numbers, constrained by certain categories, statistics show partial aspects of society. The choices made – in deciding what subjects can and/or should be counted, in defining the categories that are the basis for the collection of primary data, in selecting what should be included in the tables of disclosure of results, in comparisons made, etc. – are neither automatic nor evident and determine the image obtained from the procedures that Volume XXI Issue V Version I 44 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 C © 2021 Global Journals School Grade Repetition in Brazil: History of the Configuration of a Political and Educational Problem