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Schools of Apprentice Sailors; conduct manuals; vocational education; discipline.
This thesis aims to analyze the formation of apprentice sailors between 1922 and 1949, based on the discourses present in the instructional manuals intended for apprentices, seeking to understand how these documents guided the constitution of behaviors, values, and practices of school discipline.The Manual do Aprendiz Marinheiro published in 1922 is a book responsible for presenting propaedeutic and elementary education, while at the same time defining the functions, duties, and career in the Brazilian Navy. In turn, the Manual do Aprendiz Marinheiro published in 1949 was responsible for teaching different aspects of naval life, ranging from technical knowledge to the ways of behaving, speaking, and living as a sailor. For a better discussion of the subject, I used as my main concepts that of “discipline” based on Michel Foucault (2014) and the concept of “civility” based on Norbert Elias (1994). As a methodology, since it deals with various statements contained in the books and in Navy reports and decrees, I employed the “discourse analysis” developed by Michel Foucault (2008). I concluded that the two manuals produced and used by the Schools of Apprentice Sailors between 1922 and 1949 acted as regulators of conduct, instruments of socialization, and mechanisms for controlling bodies and minds in order to train students to behave, restrain their gestures, and ensure discipline as part of the formation of a presumed sailor identity. We argue that the discourses disseminated in these teaching materials can be considered violent in terms of bodily training, revealing how the processes of formation, discipline, and education were articulated with the educational and institutional projects of the Navy during the first decades of the twentieth century.