The Educational Systems of Brazil and the USA: A Comparative Study

 

We have demonstrated that Brazilians actively participated in the process of selecting and propagating specific aspects of US civilisation patterns in order to upgrade Brazil's traditional institutions.

It chapter of this thesis has dealt with different examples of Brazilian perceptions of the United States as a modern nation, and by extension, it has concentrated on a different aspect of the discussion regarding modernization in nineteenth-century Brazil. Let us write a brief overview of their perception of modernity and how it relates to the paradigm of 'Americanisation'. The chapter that examined the Brazilian process of abolishing slavery in light of the American experience (chapter 1) demonstrated that the Brazilian concept of American modern society in the context of abolition was linked to free labor ideology. The chapter that dealt with Brazilian representations of the United States as a place where modern freedoms could thrive (chapter 2), the U.S. modernisation is associated with a democratic administration of political power and a democratic distribution of civil liberties across society, the most visible examples being increased gender equality and religious tolerance. In chapter 3, the Brazilian representation of U.S. modern society is associated with the fundamental place that the study of the sciences and its applied character had in the organization of knowledge in the United States, whereas chapter 4 dealt with the association that Brazilians made between U.S. modernization and the democratization of consumer goods among all sectors of society.

Overall, the documentary corpus on which this study was formed indicated that there was no unidirectional process of effect by the United States on 19th-century Brazil.  On the contrary, this thesis proposes a more complicated image, namely that (North)-'Americanisation' might involve as much intrusion, imposition, or even menace as desire, wonder, and fascination with the American social model. That is why I proposed that the process of adopting elements of US civilisation patterns in Brazil could be labelled 'North-Americanisation from the South' or 'North-Americanisation from within', as I discovered that Brazilians were actively engaged in interpreting, translating, and advertising US modernisation for a specific audience, thus serving as intermediaries between this modernity and Brazil.

This research suggests that Brazilian liberal thinkers in the last quarter of the century saw the United States as a way to organize the relationship between "North-Americanization" and their concept of modern civilization. 

Additionally, they saw "North-Americanization" as a radical means of overcoming traditional barriers. I have demonstrated that the general positive attitude that Brazilian thinkers had toward the US civilisation is only subsumable to the narrative of 'Americanisation' if the significant autonomy retained by Brazilian elites in this fluid and mutually permeable relationship is acknowledged. With this proviso in mind, I suggest that favorable Brazilian representations of the United States are strongly tied to a process of (North-)'Americanization' that can be traced across the four themes that comprise the core of my thesis.
As the data examined in this study has shown, Brazilians did not passively wait for the United States to export to Brazil its own picture of a model society in which the concept of modernity was recreated. Regardless of whether US agents of any formal or informal empire acted.
Whether or not it worked in this Southern region to bring it into the expanding orbit of the United States' economic and cultural dominance over the Western Hemisphere, my sources show that Brazilian liberal thinkers actively turned to the United States as a mirror into which to project their imagination and desires. Since the early nineteenth century, Brazilians have taken an active, participatory role in familiarising themselves with many parts of their society. Theories of reception and cultural appropriation suggest that using the U.S. model of society to create representations was not done at random. On the contrary, the discursive abstractions produced and consumed by Brazilians were sculpted and articulated in response to domestic political and social disputes as well as developments across the Atlantic. As a result, the content, shape, and applications of Brazilian images of the United States evolved both synchronously and diachronically. Let us briefly summarize how the concept of the United States developed in the minds of Brazilian elites throughout the nineteenth century.

Since colonial times, several members of the Portuguese American colony have rebelled against Lisbon and attempted to form an independent federal state.

In their crusade, the colonial revolutionaries looked to the United States for intellectual guidance. This example, dated 1789, was the first I discovered when researching this issue for subsequent decades, in which Brazilians look to the United States rather than France for political models. Since the 1820s, when Brazil was already an independent nation, American industrialists have attempted to persuade the Brazilian monarchy to liberalize the navigation of the Amazon River and its natural resources. In this setting, the Brazilian political elite began to perceive the United States as a nation with imperial intentions aimed at Brazil for the first time. The receptivity of negative images of the United States increased.
News of significant events in the formation of US foreign policy in Central America, such as the annexation of Texas (1845), the US-Mexico War (1846-1848), and the leak of US plans to seize Cuba from Spain without regard for the means to do so. In the 1850s, new developments in the United States' interest in access to Amazon waterways fueled unfavorable impressions of the country throughout the Empire. According to diplomatic, parliamentary, and press sources, by the middle of the century, Brazilians presented their society as a burgeoning hemispheric force with territorial and commercial ambitions that threatened Brazil's sovereignty. The fact that, at the time, a series of research missions dispatched by the United States government began to arrive in Empire territory generated additional concerns among some elite members about the intentions of this type of hemispheric participation. To summarize, until the middle of the nineteenth century, Brazilian elites promoted a negative picture of the United States as a menacing imperialist power with embryonic commercial and territorial ambitions over the Brazilian Empire and beyond.