This article associates the studies about educational thought in Brazil. We approach the interpretations of José Veríssimo on the national problems of the Brazilian education in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Our intention is to present and analyze these interpretations, carried through in the First Republic. José Veríssimo was born in Óbidos, Pará, in 1857, and died in Rio de Janeiro, in 1916. He spent part of his intellectual life in Pará and another part in the capital of the Republic, where he established and participated actively in the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) and in the Brazilian Magazine (Revista Brasileira). The author was an important studious man in the discussions on the consequences of the Portuguese colonialism and the frustrated attempts to have some republican politics of education in Brazil. For José Veríssimo, the public education would have strategically overcome the racial degenerations promoted by the settling in Brazilian backlands. The "Brazis" that sociologically made the domestic territory to that time are thought by Veríssimo as an impediment to be overcome by the Republic for the insertion of the Country in the modern order that for him meant civilization. But this so called civilization would be effective under his perspective, as all the Brazilians were included in a project of national unit.
José Veríssimo; race; national education