PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION, DIVISION OF LABOR AND CIVIL CONSTRUCTION WORKERS

Abstract

This article is aimed at analyzing some issues concerning the history of education in Brazil to show the processes that promoted the consolidation of the educational principles committed to the capitalist logic of the accumulation in a class society. For that matter, the work demonstrates the relation of the division of labor in the definition of education, particularly, in professional education, understanding it as being the main mechanism of the consolidation of educational practices, associated with the interests of the capital and able to form the adequate workforce to the market. During the course of the work, the behavior of the state as a personification of the capital and controller of the capitalist educational guidelines is analyzed. Additionally, it indicates the struggle and resistance of the workers against a professional education that is aimed at technical, social and ideological qualifications for work. As a strategy of converging theory and practice, the specificity of civil construction work process is used since this economic activity is one of the most significant with respect to the implications of the division of labor in the process of professional education. Analyses confirm the construction of an education committed to the capitalist logic of accumulation, in which knowledge is developed by the capital and is subordinated to it. One may observe that, in the education of workers, the capital has as a primary mechanism: the intensification of the division of labor, which, in times of flexible accumulation, fragments and complicates work and workers in order to permit the increase of the capitalist accumulation. In the work process in civil construction, the different educational trajectory and the fragmentation of work and workers are clearly demonstrated. The contradictions derived from it, on the one hand, result in the increase of the tension and conflicts among workers, but on the other hand, in the increase of productivity and profitability for the capital, along with the division, exploitation and precarization of work.