The exemplary secondary school in Mallet was one of the pinnacles of Polish education in Brazil. The Mallet College became the cradle of the Polish intelligentsia, where representatives of the first generation of Poles already born on Brazilian soil were educated under the guidance of the best professors.

The first Polish secondary school in Brazil was established in a town situated amidst virgin forests, more than 200 km west of Curitiba, which was then the centre of Polish life. European colonisation of the Mallet region did not begin until 1890, when some 2,000 families from Poland settled there. In 1903, the tracks of the railway line, under construction from São Paulo towards the state of Rio Grande do Sul, were brought to the settlement. The station was named Marechal Mallet in honour of the military engineer João Nepomuceno de Medeiros Mallet. In 1909, another large group of Polish immigrants made up of 825 families arrived.

Beginnings of the Polish College

The College in Marechal Mallet owes its foundation to a group of enlightened Polish colonists who saw the need to build a bridge between the rural elementary Polish schools operating in Polish settlements and the Brazilian colleges. In 1909, a Malletian 'wendziarz' (merchant), Roman Paul, donated 3 hectares of land for educational purposes. The organisation and construction of the college facilities was handled by the Nicolaus Copernicus Society, founded in the same year, which, in addition to Paul, included local farmers, merchants and intellectuals: Tadeusz Suchorski, Romuald Krzesimowski, Stefan Bartoszek, Józef Baziewicz, Michał Trojan, Janina Krakow, Stefan Rosiński and Henryk Sobański.

"We aspire not only to cultivate with plough and hoe the native land, but also to take our rightful position in Brazilian society - in offices, in trade, in industry. This is why we must educate our sons and daughters in the colleges and then in the colleges of the hospitable Brazilian land. Citizens from Mallet and the surrounding area can serve as a good example to other Polish communities in Brazil," wrote Konrad Jeziorowski, one of the Mallet teachers.

The opening of the co-educational college and the inauguration of the first and second courses of secondary education took place on 28 February 1911. The first teacher was Stanislaw Słonina - "an expert teacher from Poland". In the second year of operation, two teachers taught at the school and the third secondary course was initiated. From 1912 to 1914, the head of the Polish Medium School in Mallet was Franciszek Hanas. For the teachers employed, flats were built in a separate building on the college grounds. In 1924 there were five permanent teachers at the school: Miecz, Fularski, Zarychta, Jeziorowski and Machado, and two years later seven. The number of pupils gradually increased. In the first year there were 16 children. In 1915 there were already 41 pupils, in 1925 -102, and in 1935 - 116.

The chronicler of the history of Polonia, Paul Nikodem wrote: "Mallet, through the establishment of the first secondary school, became, outside Curitiba, the most important centre of Polishness in Brazil."

Curriculum

In 1935, the college had seven teaching rooms, physical and chemical laboratories, a meteorological observatory, a library, a recreation hall, a dormitory, football, volleyball, basketball, tennis and athletics fields. The curriculum was comprehensive and included: arithmetic, geometry, Polish, Portuguese and German, history, geography, zoology, botany, buchaltery, chemistry, physics and mineralogy. Some subjects were taught in Polish and some in Portuguese. Pupils took part in sporting activities, learning drawing, singing and playing instruments.

The high school quickly gained a reputation in Paraná. Young people from all over the state came to study. Education at the college was paid for and not everyone could afford to educate their children. The alumni of the college had a reputation as educated graduates. Most of them took up well-paid positions as clerks, bookkeepers, managers of trading posts or teachers in Polish schools scattered in the interior of Brazil.

Nationalisation and closure of the College

The Polish College in Mallet operated successfully until 1938. The great educational efforts of the Polish community were interrupted by the nationalisation laws of President Getúlio Vargas, which banned immigrant organisations, the use of languages other than Portuguese (with a ban on language teaching for children under 14). In the newspaper 'Lud', published in Curitiba, on 25 January 1938, the M. Copernicus Society of Mallet made a brief announcement:

"The Board of Directors of the M. Copernicus College Society of Marechal Mallet notifies parents intending to send their children to the School that, in view of the impossibility of fulfilling all the points of the state decree on public schools, the College will be closed during the current year. BOARD."

Mallet College has ceased to exist. Some of the books saved went to the state grammar school (incidentally also named after M. Copernicus), which was built in Mallet on a neighbouring hill. All that remained for the founders of the secondary school was the satisfaction of having educated hundreds of graduates who joined the ranks of the Polish intelligentsia. The initiator of the first Polish secondary school, Roman Paul, summed up the quarter-century of the institution's activities years later: "When we came here - in the entire Mallet area there were only three people who could write. The closure of the college in 1938 was a great injustice for us. Maybe it wasn't all in vain after all."

Casa da Memória Mallet

The guardians of the memory of the achievements of the creators, teachers and graduates of the former Polish College are the Nicolaus Copernicus Society, which is active in Mallet. The former school building now houses the House of Memory of Polish Immigration in Mallet (Casa da Memória), where, in one of the former classrooms, an exhibition devoted to the Copernican College has been arranged. Visitors can see what remains of the once rich school equipment, including textbooks, exercise books, furniture, teaching aids, etc.

In front of the entrance to the former high school grows a majestic oak tree brought from Poland and planted by teachers with their students.