PRESENTATION

This addendum to the journal Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - the first one since the March, 2003 inaugurating number -, which comprises volume 7, of 2009, brings to the public texts specially created for the development of the Professional Education discipline: current context and issues, curricular part of the professional master's course in Professional Education in Health, developed by Escola Politécnica de Saúde at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (EPSJV/ Fiocruz). The discipline has been organized around four units: 1) professional education as object of the work-education field; 2) professional education as education and work policy; 3) polytechnic conception and integrated education; 4) professional education compared studies. For the development of each one of these units, we counted on the participation of guest teachers who produced the articles that comprise this addendum, in order to provide grounds to the debate and the work in the classroom, with the students.

Based on the problematic generally presented in this addendum, we intend to contribute so that professional education - its historical and current issues - may be analyzed in its several dimensions, and, more fundamentally, as empirical reality which, in order to be transformed, may be apprehended within the thought plan, supported by the theory and the method's rigorousness.

The delimitation in which the object 'professional education' is inserted is based on the work and education relationship, and the grounds of this relationship, on their hand, are categories studied in themselves by several social sciences disciplines. We have demarcated the work and education relationship as a social sciences interdisciplinary field and we have proclaimed the professional education study as an object of this field. If the work category comes from the work-education relationship, their meanings and the senses granted by it to this relationship in the historical time is one of the main issues dealt with by the field. Whether the work is or not an educational principle, how this concept has been constructed in the field and which are the historical and current clashes that take place regarding it are some of the aspects dealt with in our debates. This is the purpose of the studies under the axis of 'professional education as work-education field object'.

For this unit's development, we count on the essay "The Work and Education GT's path historicity: an analysis for debate", by Eunice Trein and Maria Ciavatta, in which they seek to recover the historicity of the theoretical and empirical historicity of Work and Education GT of Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação (Anped) (Post-Graduation and Education Research National Association), from its most expressive documentation, the papers selected and presented during the annual meetings from 2002 to 2007, continuing, in this manner, the previous paper published by them on Anped's magazine Revista Educação Brasileira, in 2003.

In the analysis of the scientific production carried out by Work and Education GT, the authors recover some issues of the most recurrent themes at GT's annual meetings, emphasizing two major thematic issues - the productive restructuring and the new work organization - and their consequences for the professional education. Among items and sub-items analyzed, the following can be highlighted: work and education - theory and history; work and basic education; work and education within social movements; worker education in the social relations of production; enhancement of skills and work. In the analyzed studies, they evidence the thought of educational bodies, and it is possible, from it, to understand the education and the enhancement of skills offered to workers. However, they draw our attention to the fact that expanded comprehension of the issue regarding the enhancement of skills, from the very own workers inserted in the productive process, is a perspective that still needs new research efforts.

In addition to Trein and Ciavatta's essay, for the development of the first unit, we also count on the article "Marx's education program and the praxis basis", by Justino Sousa Junior, which discusses the existence of a Marxist program of education and the place occupied in it by the 'work' and 'praxis' categories. The author understands that the education theme is not, for Marx, a central issue, and therefore he defends the need to expand the education concept, beyond the formal processes and institutionalized spaces. He understands that the summary of Marx's education program is mainly found within three elements: work, school and the political- educational praxis.

The author analyzes the polytechnic proposal, stating that the debates around this concept restores the overvaluation trend, by Marxist educators/ researchers, of the formal/institutional world of work and school, ignoring or giving secondary importance to the education processes developed in the world of daily praxis.

Work and education, which, for being structuring categories of human existence, also constitute science fields, present themselves, in the concrete social world, as public policy spheres. Within this perspective, the professional education constitutes itself in working class forming policy and it expresses, objectively, the content of the work-education relationship in certain times and social-historical scenarios, defined from the dialectic movement of union and separation between work and education. This leads us to the course unit study centered on the discussion of 'professional education as education and work policy'.

For its development, we specially counted on professors Gaudêncio Frigotto and Francisco José da Silveira Lobo Neto. Frigotto's article, "Theory and praxis and the opposition between polytechnic education and capitalist social relationships", based on the inaugurating class of the first class of the professional master's course in Professional Education in Health at EPSJV/ Fiocruz, analyzes the theoretical, political and educational, private and universal, meaning of EPSJV's experience in the sense of building, within the scope of contradictions and limits of this capitalist system, the possibilities of educational processes linked to the socialism building struggle. In this sense, it revisits the school trajectory, analyzing its theoretical milestones and the polytechnic education conception and/or technological and unilateral that guided its creation in the sense of overcoming, both from the determinism of the end of history, and from the theorism, voluntarism and activism with no direction. A utopia whose teleology is produced before the historical comprehension of the mutilating character of capitalist social relationships and their structural contradictions.

Continuing the second unit, Francisco José da Silveira Lobo Neto, in his article "The technology issue in the work-education relationship: from the conceptions to arguments and legal formulations", starting from the speeches about technology, brings understanding elements of normative formulations regarding professional education within the scenario of the current National Education Bases and Guidelines Law (Law n.º 9.394, as of December 20, 1996). The author begins discussing technology trends and conceptions found in different legal documents and then looks for meanings of the work, technology and professional education relationship. He shows in educational speeches, such as that of Rui Barbosa or Manifesto dos Pioneiros (Pioneers' Manifest - free translation), how the relationship between work, science and technique is clarified in these arguments. In order to try to understand the current conceptions of the technique and the technology in their relationship with the science, the author defends the need of having a variety of positions, to the extent that it is not possible the intention to define a strict and universal meaning of terms that mean historically produced realities.

Within the distinction between technique and technology, he draws the attention to the possibility of reinforcement of a dichotomy between systematizers/thinkers/scientists that would have the capability and the power of reflection and planning of the action, and the workers would be up to the material action of directly dealing with the technique.

Legislation and regulation of professional education, formulated within the educational remodeling of the 1990s to the 2000s, are a political expression of the hegemonic thinking of this time pressed by the needs of adapting to the changes. The stable nucleus of this movement is the human being objectifying as production factor, even if it is more required from him, now, less neuromuscular strength and more creativity and flexibility. The counter-hegemonic thinking is also a focus of our studies, seeking to analyze and understand the 'polytechnic conception and integrated education', axis from which we structured the third unit of the discipline.

In this third unit, Celso Ferretti, in his article "The educational thinking in Marx and Gramsci and the polytechnic conception", emphasizes the need to historically understand the polytechnic conception associated to the integrated education, placing them in the theoretical universe of the historical materialism. He also studies how Marx and Gramsci develop their views regarding the relationships between education and work, capturing similarities and differences between these key authors in regards to the conception of polytechnic and integrated education.

Ferretti analyzes the genesis, the development and the contradictions of school in capitalism, emphasizing the main reasons that led, within modern society, to the need of the generalization of school education. From Marx/ Engels and Gramsci's thinking in regards to the school education, the theoretical identifications and the distances between these conceptions are highlighted.

The problematic of professional education as policy that articulates work and education has been deeply studied and debated national and internationally, and, for this reason, it is systematized within the last unit of the discipline about "professional education compared studies". The world hegemonic thinking, through international bodies such as The World Bank (Bird) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), fosters educational remodeling in several countries, mainly in Latin America, with the purpose of aligning these countries' educational policy to the needs of flexible accumulation. The health sector also suffers the impacts of the macro structural adjustment process. The complexity that characterizes the health services turns health workers education into an important issue for the national and international bodies of this area. This already shows us the existence of issues concerning professional education that go beyond the contexts of each country.

Maria Ciavatta, one of the most prominent researchers in Brazil in the development of education compared studies, brings us, in her text "Compared studies - their epistemology and historicity", a reflection about what comparing is and its epistemological demands, starting from three preliminary issues: knowledge and truth, history and historicity and the meaning of comparison. She analyzes the contribution of authors that work with compared studies and recovers compared studies that she previously developed on the theme.

Based on Lukács, among other authors, she defends a conception of truth that implies admitting that the knowledge we can have is always approximate, depending on the social totality and the historical mediations particular to the object focused. Ciavatta analyzes the 'systemic nature' of compared education in Latin America, where education problems in the several countries are dealt with in a statistical, descriptive and out of the context manner, with isolated data from the social, economic, cultural and educational development of the history of each country. Finally, she emphasizes that "the quantitative data provide a dimension of the problems, but do not explain them; they only describe them with a few of their characteristics. It is the relationships, tensions, conflicts between conjuncture changes and structural materiality of a certain society, the social tissue, that enable us to apprehend, in a dialectic manner, the sense and the nature of the events in a certain historical moment".

We also present, in this addendum, articles developed from the results of our researches, whose objects are inserted in the dynamics of the work-education field and are specifically related to the health professional education thematic. Marise Nogueira Ramos, within the article "Conceptions and pedagogical practices at Technical Schools of the Unified Health System: bases and contradictions", analyzes the teaching-learning process at these schools and the influences of the health professional education policies of the 1980s to the 2000s in the development of political and pedagogical conceptions of these schools. Ana Margarida Campello et al., in turn, in "Teaching as business: the growth in the offering of health technologists' education courses in Brazil", discuss the private character of the offering growth of college courses in health technology as mediation of the mercantilism process of the Brazilian college teaching.

We hope the reading of the set of texts that are part of the first addendum to the journal Trabalho, Educação e Saúde contributes to a greater deepening of the debate and knowledge about health professional education. We end this presentation with a question that insists on being present in these times of capitalism financial crisis, times of oscillating movement for a greater approximation among the Latin American countries, mainly those of the south region, times of mobilization in the streets in many cities in the world: what are the objective and subjective bases necessary to the historical struggle of the educators for an education that allows the scientific, social, cultural, ethical and political grounds for the unilateral development of every human being?

Ana Margarida Campello

Marise Ramos

Guest Editors

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Aug 2012
• Date of issue
  2009