A educação profissional e tecnológica brasileira sob a perspectiva da formação politécnica: da colônia à década de 2000

Abstract

This study was carried out with the general aim of analyzing the history of Professional and Technological Education (EPT) in Brazil, from the colony to the 2000s, from the perspective of polytechnic training, in order to understand how professional education institutions were organized throughout history, what their pedagogical-social conceptions and functions were in the face of current national policy, as well as the contradictions inherent in the process of professionalizing the Brazilian working class. The research was limited to the historical period between colonial Brazil and the end of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's second administration. Developed from a qualitative approach, it was configured as bibliographical research, which, in a chronological narrative, described and analyzed the periods of the historical framework considered. The data revealed that over the centuries, Brazilian vocational education has been a space for conforming and submitting the lower classes to socio-economic interests and has been managed by the elites, with a depoliticizing and instrumentalizing function. Before the enactment of Law 11.982/2008, vocational and technological education was (in this order of occurrence): affiliated with hygienist conceptions; configured as an educational institution - houses of welcome, benevolence, correction; compulsory; and linked to the technicist paradigm. Following the enactment of the aforementioned law, the possibility of a polytechnic education for vocational and technological education students was introduced, with a view to building autonomy and awareness of the role they can play in society. The research enabled us to compare the history of EFA and its underlying concepts with the key concepts of polytechnics and work, understood from a Marxian and Gramscian perspective. The results showed that EFA, throughout the history of Brazilian education, has been directly linked to social class interests and capitalist development in Brazil. Furthermore, even though it has been updated over time, it has remained based on the concept of class domination and directly linked to social and racial prejudices. Movements to expand school levels and the conceptions of these institutions were linked to capitalist needs at the various stages of their development. Whether deliberately or not, governments have not confronted this problem, which has meant that the concept of polytechnics has not been effectively integrated into vocational and technological education in Brazil, at least until the historical limit considered in this research.