This article explores the connections between education and health, focussing on how these two fields were articulated around national development projects, which were defended by disputing social groups, in the new political arrangement inaugurated by Getúlio Vargas' rise to power, in 1930. Educating the rural population was an aim pursued by the defenders of the "agrarian potency-nation" as well as by those who defended the industrialization as a base for the national development. The socially constructed images about the farmer would associate him with precariousness, ignorance, diseases and indolence, likewise the character Jeca Tatu. Educating, in this context, would acquire the sense of civilizing and remedying the illnesses which devastated the countryside. It was widely spread that in Pernambuco existed a rural school model, whose experience would be known through the school newspaper O Semeador. The essence of the educational practices developed in the Alberto Torres Rural School was in the transformation of the rural people's practices and habits, using moral and hygienic education to form the "new countryman", healthier and more productive.
education; rural; hygiene; development; socialization