ABSTRACT
This article covers a wide range of documents with the purpose of problematizing some approaches to the renewal of public primary schools in Brazil, highlighting the social construction of playtime. Analyzing academic discourse within teaching, as well as records produced by public school teachers of Paraná during the first decades of the twentieth century, this study seeks to demonstrate how playtime, as part of the curriculum, has arisen informally out of teachers' worries about the burden which schools put on pupils to later transform into a constitutive element of the standards that would define the organization and management of knowledge within schools. From a diffuse understanding of its meaning to precise understanding as an important aspect of training processes, playtimes mobilized time, space and knowledge, and were articulated with other elements related to the renewing wave of education, such as methods, school subjects, practices and knowledge which affected the desire to establish a new sensibility, according to the sources. These were based on rhetorical stances which affirmed activities, experience and work, either as a means or as the goal of public primary education.
KEYWORDS
history of curriculum; playtime; education of the senses.