TEACH TO WORK: A VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN BRAZIL

Abstract

Teaching people how to work is a practice inherent in human groups, transmitted from generation to generation, through observation and empiricism, from the earliest times. However, the existence of educational institutions, in the modern sense of the term, specific to the vocational education, is much more recent. This article aims, in a very synthetic way, to present and discuss some educational initiatives for this type of education. We begin our analysis even in the colonial period and Jesuit education, when teaching the young people to work was a prerogative inherent to the survival and maintenance of Jesuit Colleges. Next, we discuss the main aspects of the Craft Guilds, their organization as masters, journeymen and apprentices, formal aspects and the principles adopted for including as a membership and permanence. Following our route along the historical process, we pay attention at the “College of the Factories”, which actually was a series of schools established by King John VI when he arrived in Brazil with the royal family. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the focus turns to the “Apprentice Craftsmen Schools created by Nilo Peçanha; then, we finalize with the creation and installation of SENAI schools in the 1940s, and the total change experienced by Vocational Education in the country after that implementation.