The Royal Yangzis

Introduction: “A nation without history is a nation without memory.” My group wants to find out if the historical events that affected Brazilian society the same that affected Graded society. We believe that if we search in history we will find some explanations for our model of society, outside and inside, the Graded school. Personally, we think that this question is interesting because we believe history leaves important marks on the different nations. The group will first research about three important historical events in Brazil: independence, slavery and democracy. Therefore, Yangzis 6’s part of the work will focus on the Brazilian democracy, Yangzis 5’s part of the work will be about slavery, and Yangzi 7’s will do Independence.

Brazilian Democracy:"A true democracy cannot exist without citizenship. When looking at the definition, democracy comes from the words “demos kratos”, which means “ruled by the people”. Moreover, it is when citizens participate of the political process in a nation state. On the other hand, citizenship, comes from citizen, is the state of being a member of a particular country and having rights. The goal of the Brazilian Democracy was to transform men into citizens. In fact, the Brazilian society was eager to play an important role in the destiny of their country. Looking back in history, we realize that democracy in Brazil is very recent. It began in 1984, after more than 20 years of dictatorship. During the military dictatorship, Brazilians went through a dark and violent period, with no political rights, no freedom of expression, and no elections. All those who disagreed, were tortured or even killed in a cruel way. Students were attacked inside universities and colleges when they tried to express their opinions. The constant pressure and the opposition of artists, journalists, politicians, students, intellectuals and others led to the democratic transition.

The beginning of democracy was marked by a new constitution in 1988, which assured new political and social rights. The new constitution ensured: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, regular and fair elections, the independence of powers and others.
The new Constitution also stated a broad range of human and social rights which are important for a true democracy. Ulysses Guimarães, the President of the National Assembly declared that this “Constitution will change men into citizens”. Another important former minister, Francisco Weffort, said in 1999, that “Only is a citizen someone who earns a fair and efficient salary, can write and read, has housing and access to hospitals and medicines, leisure when resting”.  

Unfortunately, even if Brazil is a democratic country not all people are real citizens. The majority of the population is poor, most of the workers do not get a good salary, and children don’t have access to schools or hospitals. There are a shameful big number of uneducated people, not enough medicine for the poor, even in public hospitals. There are a big number of children working in miserable conditions, sometimes like slaves, without leisure or rest. Only about 20% of the population could be considered real citizens. Obviously all those people are rich and live in very good conditions. Most of them do not care about this situation of misery. Finally, the politicians and the rich should take advantage of their privileges in order to help the less fortunate because it is the role of a good citizen. We cannot turn our backs to the situation of the majority of the Brazilian population because we have means and technology to give an end to poverty in the country and all over the globe.

Slavery: The history of the Brazilian people is connected to the slave trade. The difference of color (race) affected our culture because of the blacks and whites. Not only color but also the religion effected Brazil. All of the other religions which are not Catholic had their origins from the Africans. Their aspects and beliefs affected our culture’s development. Brazil has so many different ways of being developing because of the slave that came from Africa. The slaves that were in the ships made a huge difference in the way we live now. If the Africans on the Black Ships acted just a bit different our culture would not be the same now. They changed us a lot!

Independence: Independence day here in Brazil is September 7th. Who founded or who declared an independence day in Brazil was Dom Pedro I. Brazil was declared independent in 1822. This affected Brazil because it became a political thing but now almost every thing is political. But the independence day affects Brazil and Graded society in one form, the independence day has become a holiday so no one works and no one goes to school, so it makes you another day without school. For some of us is good ,but, for others it isn’t.

Primary Sources: All in all, we used some primary and some secondary sources. As a primary source we interviewed Mr. Di Bella and did a survey with the class. In the past two weeks, we have been searching about democracy, independence, and slavery. Each of us did a short paragraph about these three topics. For secondary sources we gathered information by using books, encyclopedias, and using the internet. We interviewed Mr. Francisco Di Bella, the Advancement Director of Graded, to answer our main question which was the historical events that affected Brazilian society the same that affected Graded Society? We are doing this big project for social studies because when we study about other things in history, we will be able to have an idea be and compare the information together.

He told us that he came to Graded when he was four and a half years old. He stayed until 17 and then he went to do college. Then, he came back nine years and two months from now. His job here at Graded is to develop institutional advancement. Some examples are the art center, the track, and fix the outdoors. It is to bring in money, goods and advance the school from outside (sources). What he said is that Graded tries to make a mix and not having only rich people in this school but also poor people.

An important thing is that he said that Graded was founded in 1920. Graded was first at Avenida Paulista. It was small. The place which Graded is right now was just  big a plain terrain with some trees. There was this little mud street that you would use to enter Graded. A thing that he said that happened in the 90s was that the globalization caused a huge growth in the Brazilian market, as a function of the investments multinationals did when they came to Brazil. The entrepreneur foreigners came and brought their families with them. And if they were coming from the outside, they wouldn’t put there sons or daughters in a Brazilian school, so with that it helped a lot of people to come to Graded. With that, Graded didn’t have only American and Brazilian students but a variety of nationalities. A thing that could have affected Graded, and did but a little, was slavery. The people whose families were slaves back when were really poor people and even after they stop being slaves their family still didn’t have the ability to pay a school like Graded. That made a group of people who did not enter Graded. And so many other stuff that happened that could affected graded and made Graded with less people but it is too much, I would spend like a day writing it so that is all.

We interviewed the people in our class and asked them this question: How many times did the history affect you in your house? There were nine people out of nineteen that were affect once or twice by the history in Brazil (forty-seven %). Nine more people were affected three or four times (forty-seven %) But only one person was affected five or six times by the Brazilian history (six %). No one was affected more than six times (zero %)!
Now a days there are no connections with the history of Brazil. We now have A LOT more technology and we have a better ways of learning but we kids don’t know much about the older history because when it happened we were not near to being born or alive.
We have some people in our class that were affected more and some not but in this case one person was affected a bit more than the rest. As you can see we have most of the students not knowing much and not being VERY affected with the history in Brazil.

Conclusion:Were the historical events that affected Brazilian society, the same that affected Graded Society? After using all our sources we found out that the answer is yes because as Mr. Di Bella said that back (in the early history) Brazil had many slaves, and these slaves had no money so they couldn’t afford a school for the family. Their descendents still don’t have enough money so that affected Graded by having a very small but rich population. Democracy in Brazil also affected Graded because, before democracy, police would attack schools and torture people who expressed their opinions. Something that Mr. Di Bella said was that in the 90s the market in Brazil grew a lot, and when the employees came from outside and they brought there family with them. So, they wouldn’t put their kids in a Brazilian school, they put them at Graded. That helped Graded by have a bigger population of different nations.
 

Citations:

1. “Definition citizenship.” Cambridge Learner’s. Dictionary. © Cambridge University Press 2004. 2006. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/cld/
    

2. Democracy. Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. ©Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 2006. 2006.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
   Democracia no Brasil. Revista Eletrônica de Ciências, Artigo. ©

3. Revista Eletrônica de Ciências - Número 24 - Fevereiro / Março de 2004. 2006. http://www.cdcc.sc.usp.br/ciencia/artigos/art_24/demobr.html
    

4. Slavery in Brazil. http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=8161&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html