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The central focus of this thesis is an examination of a major innovation in rural education in Brazil: the growth of the Consolidated School Movement in the State of Parana in the mid 1980s. An assessment of this innovation is carried out empirically in Chapter Three, using both quantitative and qualitative data. The core question is: what, on the basis of various indices, have been the measurable success and failures of the movement? This detailed empirical work is located against two broader parameters: the general problematique of rural education in Brazil (the work of chapter one); and the general solutions to rural education problems which the innovators of Parana invoked: the Consolidated School Movement of the USA in the nineteenth century (the work of chapter two). The general argument of Chapter One is that urbanisation, industrialization and the class structure of Brazil have not only increased the gap in the provision of education between urban and rural education (to the detriment of the latter), but also that efforts at a 2 3 solution to the problems of rural education have, in Brazil, been ineffective and belated. The general argument of Chapter Two is that - despite important differences between the USA in the nineteenth century and Parana in the twentieth - the USA experience contains important hints for the terms of success of a Consolidated School Movement in Brazil contemporaneously, and increases our understanding of the Parana experience. Chapter Four acts as a conclusion to the thesis, and reassesses some of the detailed results of the fieldwork in terms of the Brazilian context, and historical experience, before making proposals for the further improvement of the Parana situation.