Abstract:

In Brazil, since Lula’s government (2003-2010), vocational education was expanded to a great proportion. Moreover, a new policy for the technical schools of the Federal Vocational Education system was formulated, that had them organized as Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology (FIEST). They are institutions that join several campus and offer superior, basic and vocational education, in several areas of technical and technological schooling. Not all the institutions are new, but they can be organized by integrating two or more existing federal vocational education institutions. They can also be organized by transforming Federal Technological Education Centers and Technical Schools attached to Federal Universities. Today, there are 38 Federal Institutes in Brazil. In Minas Gerais, there are five FIEST, but there is resistance from some Technical Schools to resist the new organization of Federal Institutes. The objective of the new organization of Technical Schools is to prepare professionals for the labour market and prepare teachers for public schools, mainly in the areas of physics, chemistry and biology. The present study intends to analyze the process of reorganizing the federal technical and technological school system. As it is a new subject in the Brazilian educational reality, there are few researches that deal with it. The bibliographical revision on the organization of the school system in Brazil shows that it assumes a dualistic configuration, that retraces the decade of the nineteen thirties: a type of the vocational education school, destined, especially, for the subordinate social classes and another type of school, of academic character, destined to prepare people to form the dominant elite. Such duality of school exists, at last, in the great majority of the capitalist countries, as Gramsci demonstrated when examining the differentiation of schools in Italy. His theories on the State and education let us think that, nevertheless the interesting expansion of the technical school system and its reorganization, it is a policy aiming to consolidate a system of vocational education parallel to the secondary and academic school. This study is still in progress and integrates an ampler research on federal and technical education at high school level in the State of Minas Gerais, which investigates more than the organization of the Technological Institutes, but also the formation of teachers, the persistence and failure of students and the transition of the students from the technical schools to the labour market and superior education.

Keywords:

Organization, Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology, Brazilian Vocational Education.