Many critics treat the republican regime in Brazil as a simple continuation of the monarchic period due to the fragility of its implantation. Critics of the tradition of the creation of a strong monopoly state in the country are equally common-place and accord tones of fatality to the idea of the historical formation of an inexorably passive type of definitively anthropological citizen, setting rigid limits to the democratisation of Brazilian society. The impossibility of the public school forming citizens would thus be proven - all the arguments to the contrary consisting only of re-editions of the old myth of the educational demiurge? By attempting to unite elements capable of analysing these anthropological constructions which form the base of the experience of Brazilian citizenship, this article brings into perspective what is without a doubt the first and most central of democratic requirements: the unconditional and unconditionable affirmation of the political equality of citizens.
Public school; 1st Republic; citizenship