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

education would be unproductive, and to organize selective classes in the first elementary grade, each being educated according to their pace. Thus, it was thought to be possible to arrange homogeneous classes in which simultaneous teaching would be not only possible, but efficient. Faced with similar concerns, the School Enforcement and Statistics Division, Federal District, attempted the homogeneous classification of students between 1933 and 1935. André Paulilo (2012, p.42) emphasizes that “the formation of classes in those years was a technical possibility not only to organize the school, but to make it achieve, optimize its processes and ensure learning.” The composition of these classes resorted to the tests in vogue at the time. This process, according to the author, not only added standardized tests to the field of school observations, but considered students’ behavioral events in order to distinguish a class of students from another. The degree of attention devoted to the objective settings of the classroom situated more than the children, their achievement, their fitness, their expressive manifestations, and character in the scope of public education policies (Paulilo, 2012, p.42). The classificatory rationality framed the conviction that the more accurate the procedures for homogeneous distribution of students, the better the results in terms of learning. In 1936, the Department of Education and Public Health published a bulletin titled Failures in elementary school , which presented a study on the issue carried out at the request of Almeida Júnior, then Secretar y 7 7 We reviewed 18 bulletins published by the Educational Board of the Department of Education and Public Health of São Paulo, between 1936 and 1938, during the administration of Almeida Júnior. . Luiz Gonzaga Fleury, author of the study, claimed that one of the causes of failure was the “heterogeneous classes, whether in degree of student learning, or their mental index” (São Paulo, 1936, p.17). He stressed further that this cause could not be avoided in isolated schools – where repetition rates were, in fact, higher, he said – or even in the small school groups, but it seemed undeniable the need for better and more comprehensive student selection processes and organization of classrooms in other schools. In another bulletin published by the same department, Noemy Silveira Rudolfer, of the Applied Psychology Laboratory of the Institute of Education, reported that in a class whose grouping has taken place randomly (i.e., did not follow any selection criteria), there will likely be 16% strong, 16% weak and 68% intermediate students. It then concluded that, in this way, teaching would always be inadequate for a significant portion of students. This warranted the provision of a detailed sequence of procedures that should be used in schools, such as the assignment of students to strong, intermediate and weak groups, the double promotion scheme in the school year, the organization of special classes for the most severe cases, and use of tests (ABC and Dearborn and Ballard), as well as the consideration of the academic performance of the previous year. It should be noted that the emphasis on the homogeneity of the classes meant, as highlights Rosa Fátima de Souza (2006), the establishment of a contradiction: a greater efficiency was sought so as to allow democratization of schooling, while at the same time it strengthened selectivity and school exclusion. According to the author, on the pedagogical level, the establishment of divisions in schools enabled a better performance of the school institution, but the school became more selective because the grouping of students in homogeneous classes supposed favoritism of the best at the expense of the “weak” students. In addition, the classification in courses generated improvement of exams and created the notion of repetition , which would constitute one of the greatest problems of elementary education of all times (Souza, 2006, p.45, original italics). It is clear, therefore, already in the early 1900s, that repetition appears as a notion and failure begins to appear in official documents as a matter deserving attention. However, neither had yet been featured as an issue to be managed by the Brazilian education policy makers. We must consider that the specialized discourses that supported teacher training activities and official speeches that sought to prescribe legally authorized school practices during the first republican decades, make us see the existence of these issues. But, in quantitative terms, school attendance still remained very restricted. On the one hand, it is important to point out that, until the 1930s, a very small portion of the population went to school, whatever it was, and remained there for a short time. On the other hand, even with the continuous increase in access to education throughout the twentieth century, it took more than has been assumed for most students to attend grade-based schools, governed by teachers who had been trained in accordance with modern pedagogical discourses (which taught to teach simultaneously in homogeneous classes, for example), arranged according to the requirements mentioned above. These two elements allow us to understand why, despite the earlier circulation of skilled and official discourses about school selectivity, failure and repetition do not appear as a political-educational problem before 1930. Add to this the lack of well-organized statistics to be able to account for school attendance in the country, showing the number of students who passed and failed and repeaters and dropouts. In other words, the number of enrollments was still small, and those enrolled were not always subjected to the times and paces imposed by the law and modern pedagogy, and the ability of the Volume XXI Issue V Version I 49 ( ) 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