Classifying and institutionalizing childhood: connections between family and school in Arthur Ramos’s work The Problem Child

Abstract

In this text we propose to analyze the writings of the physician, anthropologist and psychoanalyst from Alagoas Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) on the so-called “problem child”, formulated in the late 1930s, based on observations of professionals in some public schools in the then District Federal, Rio de Janeiro, between the years 1934 and 1939, the so-called Experimental Schools. We will focus on the type of child labeled by Ramos as chased away, which in the book was intended 4 chapters where the author explores how the conditions of the child's vital environment are determinant for their learning, sociability, and conditions or not for possible misfits. The objective of the text is to reassemble part of the sociological, educational and psychological history about the vision of poor childhood in Brazil, and how this interpretation carried out a form of sanitary subjection of those children, that used to be seen as potential problems for the nation, since poverty and eviction were closely related.