Everardo Backheuser

Everardo Adolpho Backheuser (23 May 1879 – 1 January 1951) was a Brazilian engineer, geologist, geographer, writer, politician, pedagogue, Esperantist and civil servant who became known as the father of geopolitical studies in Brazil and of the policy of strengthening Brazil's borders, as well as being responsible for the creation of the Federal Territories and the restructuring of primary education in the country.

Biography

Everardo Backheuser was born in Niterói, the son of the merchant João Carlos Backheuser and Joaquina Eugênia de Gouveia Gonçalves. He was the grandson of Germans and French who had lived in Brazil since the second half of the 19th century. Backheuser lost his father when he was two years old.

He attended primary school at a school run by his aunt, Evelina Backheuser, who prepared him to study at Colégio Pedro II. At this institution he studied secondary education and a bachelor's degree in Letters between 1889 and 1896, having already been teaching since 1894, with private lessons. He then enrolled at the Polytechnic School (now UFRJ), graduating in Geographical Engineering in 1899 and in Civil Engineering and Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1901. He came first in his class and was awarded the Gomes Jardim prize.

Concerned about property speculation and the poor housing standards of Rio de Janeiro's lower classes, he was the intellectual mentor of the urban reform carried out by the Pereira Passos administration in 1906.

In 1907, he was admitted to the Polytechnic School, teaching descriptive geometry, architecture, construction, mineralogy, geology and botany. He received his PhD in Physical and Natural Sciences in 1913. He taught at UFRJ until 1925, dividing his time between his professorship at the Fluminense Technical School between 1922 and 1925 and his terms as a state representative between 1911 and 1918. In 1924, he was one of the founders of the Brazilian Education Association.

He completed his conversion to Catholicism on 25 October 1928, when he made his profession of faith in Niterói Cathedral. The personal process was accelerated by the recent death of his religious wife Ricarda Restier Gonçalves Backheuser in a traffic accident followed by a medical error on 25 July. Shortly afterwards, on a trip to Germany after retiring, he got to know the idea of the New School more deeply and, as soon as he returned, he took over the running of five municipal schools in the Federal District to try out some methods and analyse the results. Together with his second wife, Alcina Moreira de Souza Backheuser, he was one of the creators of the Pedagogical Crusade in Favour of the New School. As part of the Fernando de Azevedo Reform, the Crusade was an educational initiative that set out to promote an urban-Catholic ethos based on the training of teachers and the dissemination, from the perspective of the Church's doctrinal principles, of the precepts of the New School.

After the 1930 Revolution, he was asked to teach in the first class of the Military Geographic Institute, the embryo of the current Cartographic Engineering Course at the Military Institute of Engineering. He also took part in the commission to audit the public debt of the state of Rio de Janeiro, then governed by Ary Parreiras. During the 1933 Constituent Assembly, he chaired the Rio de Janeiro Geographical Society's commission to study the country's territorial management. He presented a report to the President of the Republic and the Constituent Assembly, criticising the federalism of the 1891 Constitution and defending the political concentration of the Union and the rational redivision of the territories of the states, which he proposed renaming "Provinces". He also proposed the transfer of the Federal Capital to the interior and the creation of ten Federal Territories along the entire border (except for Rio Grande do Sul), managed directly by the Union, through governors appointed by the President of the Republic. According to General Carlos de Meira Mattos, "Backheuser's ideas produced the policy of strengthening our neighbouring regions", under the principle that "border policy should not be regional, but federal".

On 7 September 1933, during the event to found the Brazilian Catholic Confederation of Education, his name was suggested for the presidency by Father Leonel Franca and unanimously accepted by the participants. He then took on the leadership of the Catholic teachers' associations that were being organised throughout Brazil, one in each state. In 1936, he was invited by the then Minister of Education, Gustavo Capanema, to give his opinion on the National Education Plan. The following year, together with his wife, he represented Brazil at the International Week of Primary Education and Pedagogy in Paris. Between 1938 and 1945, he chaired the newly-created National Primary Education Commission, which would draft Decree-Law 8.529 of 1946, responsible for restructuring teaching in schools from the 1st to the 4th grade. Among other things, he was responsible for revoking the civil rights of parents who failed to fulfil their school duties, and for leading the adoption of the Portuguese language in schools in German-settled areas, which should also follow the guidelines set by the federal government, as well as advocating uniform curricula in the states. He was the main mentor behind the restructuring of Brazilian primary education between 1942 and 1946. Also during the Commission's work, in 1939, Backheuser became president of Catholic Action's National Education Secretariat, on the recommendation of Cardinal Sebastião Leme.

He was a contributor for the important Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Paiz (under the editorship of journalist Alcindo Guanabara) and held various positions in the Federal District City Hall, such as chief engineer, secretary to the mayor, etc. etc. He was also a founding member and 1st Secretary of the Brazilian Society of Sciences, now the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He was also the founder and president of the Brazilian Esperanto Club (Brazila Klubo Esperanto), campaigning to spread the use of the language, especially in academic circles, as a way of universalising the knowledge produced in different nations in a single language.

From 1941, he became a professor at the Catholic Faculty of Philosophy and at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Santa Úrsula Institute. In 1948, his chair of Geopolitics was founded at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

Works

• Habitações populares. Relatório apresentado ao Exm. Sr. Dr. J. J. Seabra (1906)
• Cristais: Factos e Hipóteses (1916)
• A faixa litorânea do Brasil Meridional. Ontem e hoje (1918)
• A estrutura política do Brasil. Notas prévias (1926)
• A sedução do comunismo (1933)
• Problemas do Brasil. Estrutura geopolítica. O espaço (1933)
• Ensaio de Biotipologia Educacional (1941)
• Manual de Pedagogia Moderna (Teórica e Prática) – para uso das Escolas Normais e Institutos de Educação (1948)
• Curso de geopolítica geral e do Brasil (1952)
• Minha terra e minha vida: Niterói há um século (1994)

References

Cursini, Caio (2023). "Everardo Backheuser e a Geopolítica nos Jornais: Uma Análise das Primeiras Publicações sobre o Tema no Brasil," Boletim Campineiro de Geografia, Vol. XIII, No. 1, pp. 63–77.

Gomes, Clecia Aparecida (2020). "Urbanismo e Educação: Ideários Modernos nas Engenharias da Nação. Rio de Janeiro, Anos Iniciais do Século XX," Revista de História, No. 179, pp. 1–30.

Lima, Wendell Teles de et al. (2017). "A Geopolítica de Everardo Backheuser para o Brasil entre Processos e Retrocessos," Revista Geopolítica Transfronteiriça,, Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 51–62,

Miyamoto, Shigenoli (1995). Geopolítica e Poder no Brasil. Campinas, SP: Papirus.

Pinto, N. B. (2021). "Everardo Adolpho Backheuser: Um Expert da Educação Matemática?," Cadernos CEDES, Vol. XLI, No. 115, pp. 239–56.

Rosa, Maristela da (2018). Escolanovismo Católico em Manuais de Pedagogia de Everardo Backheuser (1934-1948). São Leopoldo: Educação Usininos.

Santos, Sydnei Martins Gomes dos (1989). A Cultura Opulenta de Everardo Backheuser: Os Conceitos e as Leis Básicas da Geopolítica. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Carioca de Engenharia.

External links

• Contribuições de Everardo Backheuser para a renovação da Pedagogia Católica no Brasil (1928-1946)