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

The adoption of simultaneous teaching and grades was based on the understanding of the possibility and necessity of organizing homogeneous classes. It was considered that, in order for the school to be efficient, able to teach in the timeframes established by the official programs, it was necessary to improve the criteria of class composition so that students with equivalent learning performance and content proficiency levels were put in the same grade. The make-up of these classes was based primarily on two resources. The first one focused attention on the prior assessment of each child’s abilities, even before the beginning of schooling, resorting to psychological, schooling, and developmental tests. The second was the school-based assessment proper, which relied mainly on mastery of the contents taught, leading to passing or failure at the end of the school year. Thus, the student who did not prove sufficient mastery of the contents taught in a particular grade was prevented from proceeding to the next grade, having to restart the grade in which he/she failed. That is, he repeated the year. In this arrangement, failure, retention and repetition are understood as necessary for the proper and efficient functioning of the school. If it worked as planned, this model would allow each grade level to correspond to the age range of students. So, ideally, children would start going to school at age 7 in first grade, would be 8 in second grade, and so on. Nevertheless, the regularity in that flow was not confirmed in the daily life of schools, and already in the first decades of the twentieth century there were frequent discussions about the distortions that prevented the functioning of the model. But what was called into question was not the appropriateness of the assumption that supported the model, but students’ disabilities and limitations. Extensive debates and numerous studies sought to identify “abnormal” children in order to avoid that they could hinder the smooth running of the school. Based on this understanding, improvement of teaching presupposed the development of tests that allow to identify and classify slow or incapable students. Tests for selection and classification of students were then taught and widely recommended to teachers as a way to help improve the quality of primary education. In psychology textbooks for teachers, which circulated in the early twentieth century, it was commonly recommended the use of intelligence tests, especially those developed by Binet, which allowed to identify retarded children and determine each student’s mental level, in order to direct them to the most appropriate type of education for their individual needs (Lima and Viviani, 2015, p.103). Alfred Binet was one of the most important researchers of experimental psychology in Europe and, since the late nineteenth century, he engaged in developing procedures supposedly capable of measuring mental functions (Monarcha, 2009). In 1904, Binet was appointed by the Ministry of Education in France to join a commission whose assignment was to diagnose students’ mental level “for subsequent creation of special classes and application of educational programs appropriate to the levels of intelligence found” (Monarcha, 2009, p.186). The French government was particularly interested in identifying students with low intellectual capacity in order to remove them from regular schools, intending thereby to ensure a more efficient pedagogical achievement. In this sense, Claparède, an enthusiast of the proposal, said: We are at a time when the issue of abnormal children has begun to worry the spirits in France. While in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland a special education for this category of children had long been in place, nothing had yet been provided to them in the French school organization ( apud Monarcha, 2009, p.186). Studies by Binet have been read with interest by the Brazilian elite that intended to organize the nation through schooling. With a strongly liberal bias, these individuals were engaged in “evolving biometric practices and propose an education that is consistent with innate abilities, which was considered to be the way to settle the dilemma of legal equality and biological difference” (Monarcha, 2009, p.208). Of the psychological tests proposed for the Brazilian school in this period, the “ABC Test” deserves mention 6 The principles of pedagogical rationale were clearly expressed there, whereby it would be possible to identify the retarded children, for whom standard . Developed by Lourenço Filho, at the time occupying the chair of Pedagogy and Psychology of the Escola Normal da Praça da República , in São Paulo, and strongly based on Binet’s studies, the “ABC tests”, a set of tests meant to evaluate motor coordination, memory, attention, etc., sought to identify students' maturity levels for learning to read and write. In the book Introdução ao estudo da Escola Nova , 1930, Lourenço Filho ( apud Monarcha, 2009, p.221) stated: On a trial and error basis, experimental psychology succeeded in obtaining practical means for investigations necessary to classify individuals, which is possible today without long or hard work through relatively simple objective means. These means are the psychological tests , small exams under well-defined conditions, and whose significant values are only set after biostatistical investigations. Through them, one not only gets to the rational organization of homogeneous classes, to selective and differentiated (or “tailored”, as Claparède called it) instruction, but also to the scientific classification of abnormal intelligence , the organization of classrooms or schools for supernormal individuals, professional guidance and selection, discrimination of temperaments and special skills. 6 It is noteworthy that only in the 1930s the “ABC test” will be discussed in educational media and used in schools. Volume XXI Issue V Version I 48 ( ) 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