ABSTRACT
This article was written as an opening lecture for the II Encontro de Pensamento Social Brasileiro: 100 years of 1922 and the transformations of modern Brazil. In it, I highlight what I understand to be a political-cultural project of modernization of the country through a “national education," which was explicit in the 1890s, and remained on the agenda in the following decades. For that, I analyze the contributions of three essential authors - José Veríssimo, Gonzaga Duque, and João Ribeiro - working with three of their books, little known but very representative of the thinking of a good part of the intellectual elites of the First Republic. Seeing themselves as bearers of a mission dedicated to overcoming the country's “backwardness," they relativized scientific determinisms (climate and race), defending that public and compulsory education was an effective possibility of nationalizing and modernizing Brazil.
Keywords:
Intellectuals; National Education; Modernization