ENSINO MÉDIO PÚBLICO: FORMAÇÃO HUMANA OU PARA O MERCADO?

Abstract

The present work is the result of a research conducted between 2009 and 2011 during the Graduate Program in Education; it was a requirement for the defense of PhD thesis at Catholic University of Goiás - GO-PUC. The aim of this study is to analyze whether the Brazilian propedeutic Secondary School provides training for human development or for the labor market. The struggle between capital and labor is spelled out in the Brazilian economic model that is contradictory in its process combining vocational and propedeutic high school with unequal investment policies. In the general context of the restructuring process, certain knowledge previously spurned, like easiness in communication, reading comprehension and abstract reasoning, nowadays, are considered important factors of production. The works of Marx (1968, 1978, 2006 and 2007), Marx and Engels (1965), Kuenzer (1988, 1997 and 2000), Saviani (1984, 2005), Chauí (1980), Bourdieu (2010), Antunes (1995 , 2001, 2004, 2006, 2009), Bruno (1996), Enguita (1993), Frigotto (1995, 2001, 2009), Gentili (1995), Paiva (1995), Ponchmann (2004, 2009), Boito (2005) , Bardin (2004), Dione and Laville (1999) and Triviños (1987), constitute the theoretical basis used for the analysis of the problem. Materialist dialectics was chosen as a method that guides the present study. The research sample consists of workers in the tertiary sector, specifically in the areas of trade and services, who conducted their studies in public schools in the metropolitan area of Goiânia, from the propedeutic model of high school. According to the evaluation of workers participating in the survey, the public high school does not allow understanding and mastering the fundamentals and principles of scientific and technological processes, especially the more complex knowledge that may enable greater autonomy to the worker, such as: - understanding and interpreting complex graphics; - better conditions for assessment and intervention on the work reality; - ability to search and select information and build new knowledge, - domain and interaction with new technologies - skills to solve complex problems on unexpected working situations. The results indicate that the propedeutic public high school still excluded from the structural reforms of the education system, supported by a socioeconomic model that promotes the subordination and precariousness of the working class to capital, from the increased extraction of added value. The Law 11.741/2008, which separates the objectives of the High School from Professional and Technical Level Middle School, reduces the propedeutic public high school to a subcategory, it maintains the duality of this education level and prevents the possibility of establishing an educational model with omnilateral, unitary and polytechnic training for most of the working class.