COLÉGIO PEDRO II – CAMPUS CENTRO
Address: 80 Marechal Floriano Avenue, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Themes: Universities and the Student Movement
Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Brooks
The Pedro II School is a historic federal institution and a standard-bearer for elementary and higher education in Brazil. The school, originally established to meet the Brazilian elite’s need for formal education, first stood on what today is Marechal Floriano Peixoto Avenue, which at the time was Largar de São Joaquim Street (the building was named a national heritage site in 1983 by the Institute for National Historic and Artistic Patrimony – IPHAN). In 2015, it educated more than 12,000 students across the institution’s 12 campuses. During the military dictatorship, the school suffered oppression from the government, and its staff, teachers, and students fought back.
The Pedro II School was founded in 1837, a mere fifteen years after Brazil’s independence, and before Pedro II officially assumed the throne. In an intensely contested period for politics, the school served to reaffirm Brazilian values as it emerged as a nation. The student body was composed of the children of the political and economic elite who would eventually take on important roles in public administration. All other Brazilian schools were meant to follow the education model of the Imperial School of Pedro II (also known as The Pedro II School). Graduating students received the Bachelor in Science and Letters diploma which granted them access to higher education.
The curriculum of the Pedro II School followed European norms and sought to simultaneously affirm Brazilian national identity and establish parity between the “empire of the tropics” and European nations.
After the Proclamation of the Republic, the name of the school changed, first to the National Secondary Education Institute, and later to National School. The republicans’ intention was to extricate the school from its imperial past and the nation-state project it had represented. In 1911, Hermes da Fonseca, president and alumnus of the School, restored the original name.
During the so-called Revolution of 1930, the Pedro II School served as a provisional barracks for displaced troops who supported President Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. During the Vargas regime, the institution served as a laboratory for developing education policy. In 1930, the Minister of Education, Francisco Campos, officially established Pedro II as a “benchmark school” for secondary education.
From 1945-1964, student activism at Pedro II grew threw strikes. Among various internal demands, students called for participation in the school’s decision-making process and an education oriented towards understanding the reality of Brazil. Externally, they collaborated with the university student movement. In 1956, they went to the streets to support a decrease in streetcar fares and, in 1963, to demand discounted entries to theaters and cinemas. They also participated in important political moments, like the demonstration to guarantee tenure for João Goulart’s presidency in 1961.
The coup of 1964 changed the course of education in Brazil. Students and professors that represented threats to the government were persecuted. Therefore, the student movement – university and secondary – became illegal.
In the post-coup context, educators’ proposals for a free, quality public education at a national level were boycotted. The military’s education project responded to the demands of North American agencies (with agreements like MEC-USAID – United States Agency for International Development). The regime’s conception of education was essentially technical in nature.
Within the school, the government also tried to expel professors it considered inconvenient. The director for external affairs, Roberto Accioli was removed and replaced by the assistant director, Carlos Potsch. A director general was installed to supervise the entire school. Teachers were still being fired or ousted throughout 1964, largely through the Commission for General Inquiry of the MEC, using the First Institutional Act. (AI-1). The fired teachers included Hélio Marques da Silva and Bayard Demaria Botteux. Others, like Cleantho Rodrigues de Siqueira, Alberto Coelho de Souza, Roberto Bandeira Accioli and Hélio Marques da Silva were forced to retire without their pensions under the Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5), which took effect in 1968.
In 1968, students continued fighting for more freedoms for the student body and for improvements to their education. That year, the Academic Board for the School of Pharmacy of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) met to organize a secondary school students’ movement. But they lost hope after the AI-5 and ordinance no. 477 forced unions to shut down and limited students’ ability to organize. Beyond this, nearly a hundred students were expelled from the school, accused of involvement with leftist movements. From then on, student resistance movements went underground. Meanwhile, despite these challenges, students maintained their access to an outstanding, critical education. Historian Francisco Carlos Teixeira, student of Pedro II School during the military dictatorship, describes his experiences in school as productive, even during this period of authoritarianism:
It was a very creative school. I was in the classic humanities program, which prepared me to study philosophy and letters. We had Latin, Greek, literature, history, and geography classes and two language classes, which in my case were French and German. We read everything from Homer to Brecht […] The environment of Pedro II was far richer than what I found in university (Silva, 2008).
In the 1970s, the school remained under observation for suspicious activities. Throughout the decade, the director general consistently awarded students’ work that aligned with the ideas of the military dictatorship. At the same time, it repressed any kind of opposition. For example, it vetoed the appearance of Chico Buarque and MPB4 in 1972.
The following former students of the Pedro II School were some of the victims killed or disappeared by the state during the dictatorship: Aldo Sá Britto Souza Neto, Alex de Paula Xavier Pereira, Anselmo André Amador Jr., Antônio Sérgio de Mattos, Fernando Augusto Valente da Fonseca (known at school by his code-name, Sandália), José Roberto Spignier, Kleber Lemos, Lincoln Bicalho Roque, Lucimar Brandão Guimarães, Luiz Alfonso Mirando Rodrigues, and Marchos Nonato Fonseca. It is also important to mention the names of João Barcellos Martins and Lincoln Cordeiro Oest, both of whom studied at Pedro II much earlier, but who were also casualties of the dictatorship.
Between 2004 and 2010, Pedro II School underwent its last cycle of expansion with the creation of campuses in Realengo, Niterói and Duque de Caxias. This extension of the school, now split between eight campuses, did not negatively impact student coordination. There remains broad cooperation between student unions across campuses, and the students of Pedro II hold onto their historic reputation for engagement in the country’s important social issues. Resistance to the military dictatorship is a recurring theme in the institution’s memory.
In 2011, with pressure from faculty and students, the school’s removed Admiral Augusto Hamann Rademaker Grünewald’s name from the administration building in the São Cristóvão neighborhood due to his association with those who coordinated the coup in 1964.
In 2014, fifty years after the coup, the various student unions organized an event on April 2 called, “We will not forget: the truth is hard, but we confront the dictatorship!”, in the Mário Lago theater in the São Cristóvão neighborhood. Diverse activities sought to draw critical attention to the historic moment and memorialize the era’s student resistance from Pedro II. In an extraordinary event, on November 14, 2014, the school awarded the title “Distinguished Student In Memoriam” to the former students persecuted by the military regime.