Indígenas, jesuítas e colonizadores na história e na historiografia da educação no Espírito Santo (1551-1599)

Abstract

We analyze the history of colonial education in Espirito Santo in the second half of the 16th century, in the midst of the “relations of strength” (GINZBURG, 2002) that crossed the contacts between natives, Jesuits and colonizers. To this end, we investigated the cataclysmic and doctrinal actions of the members of the Society of Jesus, as well as the knowledge produced by natives in the territory where the captaincy of Vasco Fernandes Coutinho was established, highlighting the everyday, non-institutionalized educational processes as a counterpoint to the “pedagogical formalism” characteristic of the Jesuit schools (PAIVA, 2000). Among the sources that are part of the documentary corpus, Jesuit literature was preferred, especially the letters written in Espirito Santo and the travelogues, which were analyzed according to the evidential method, based on theoretical-methodological contributions of microhistory related to the thinking of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg (GINZBURG; CASTELNUOVO; PONI, 1991; GINZBURG 2002, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009) and Giovanni Levi (2000), as well as on the contributions of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda to the studies of the Brazilian colonial period (HOLANDA, 1994; 1995). The results point to the attention of the Ignatian Fathers on evangelization, education to customs and, to a lesser extent, instruction; and on the diversity and importance of the assimilation of indigenous knowledge for the survival and underpinning of the settlement in a natural environment little affected by hostile Europeans and external elements.