Concepções de técnica e tecnologia na educação profissional brasileira: uma análise de seus pressupostos à luz da epistemologia da técnica

Abstract

In Brazil, both High School and Professional Education have had their purposes questioned over time and have been the focus of intense debates in different reforms. Both have been influenced by cultural, social, political and economic factors, and the dominant discourse has repeatedly rested on a conceptual dualism, a reading of the world filtered according to conceptual pairs of opposites, which always hides a hierarchy and a preference for one of the extremes. Identifying the epistemological assumptions that have constituted Professional and Technological Education over time in Brazil enables the understanding of how the construction of knowledge occurs and how to do science in a teaching modality that was and still is, for the most part, made in a practical way, based on “knowing how to do”. With this in mind, this research aims to analyze the concepts of technique and technology and their implications in institutional documents of Professional Education in the light of the Epistemology of Technique. The study is exploratory and descriptive, with a predominantly qualitative approach. The information was gathered through documentary and bibliographical research, using documents from public archives, official documents, such as laws, decrees, or parliamentary publications, through draft laws and reports, in addition to documents from the National Education Council (CNE) and the National Curricular Guidelines for Professional Education. Discursive Textual Analysis supported the process of identifying and analyzing the indicated concepts. Supported by the dialectical perspective and searching for historical aspects, contradictions and causes, the research presented here was based on the Epistemology of Technique and sought debate with authors who take HistoricalDialectical Materialism as their basis. The results enabled the evaluation that different conceptions of technique and technology have permeated the constitution of Brazilian Professional Education, but without playing a leading role in the constitution of the philosophical, epistemological or pedagogical conceptions of this teaching method, a fact that occurs due to the historical, social and cultural construct regarding manual work in the country, which contains a contradiction that persists to this day. Therefore, the epistemological presuppositions that have constituted Professional and Technological Education over time in Brazil are rooted in bachelorism, science and academicism, shaping it as a continuation or appendix of general and propaedeutic education, relegating technique, which should be intertwined with it, to a secondary role, indicating the need to redirect its epistemological assumptions só that it assumes a leading role in the production of knowledge in this teaching method.