O pensamento americanista na educação brasileira: o projeto dos ginásios polivalentes (1960 – 1970)

Abstract

This work presents the configuration of a vocational-technical school model, considered an ideal in passive bourgeois revolutions, under the leadership of the United States of America. Specifically in Brazil, this educational model called Polyvalent Vocational School was crucial for the reform of basic education, with the enactment of the Law 5.692 / 1971, providing the implementation of technical vocational education. This research had as general objective to produce knowledge about the implantation of the Polyvalent Vocational Schools in Brazil, looking forward to identifying in the documents that define its conception, legalization, and implantation of PVSs, typical civilizing traits of Americanism that might be circulating in the construction of this educational project. We can see these cultural aspects of Americanism in the version called entrepreneurship, a form derived from the theory of Taylorist/Fordist organizational culture. For those entrepreneurs, education must serve the industrial production, as it is the source of work force for this production. For them, investing in education boosts production and brings forth more profitability than any other material investment. Polyvalent Vocational School represent the consolidation of the vocational-technical school model that has registered experiences in Brazil since the 1920s. For the elaboration of this thesis, several academic papers dealing with the subject, directly or indirectly, among books, theses and dissertations were analyzed. Two of these books had chapters translated from English to Portuguese. A field research was also carried out in the Program of Studies and Documentation Education and Society - PROEDES - of the School of Education of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ. We selected only a few by the criterion of pyramidal approach. From broad actions that branch off to a specific aspect. Furthermore, the cultural aspects of entrepreneurship have been radiated from the elite co-optation and structuring means to the widespread through mass schooling. Thereunto, we present the analysis of six academy-figures that contained speeches about the actions of the Escritório de Ponto VI; the collection of speeches on the Alliance for Progress Program, conducted by the US Ambassador in Brazil in the 1960s, and finally, an analysis of direct actions for the construction of the Polyvalent Vocational School project. As reference for analyzing these three stages, I approach concepts of the philosophers Michel Foucault and Antônio Gramsci. Foucault, for the understanding of the creation of means of acting in the triangle - sovereignty, discipline and governmental management - and how these are part of the term 'governmentality' in order to govern the population through essential mechanisms and/or safety devices. From Gramsci two concepts: Hegemony and Passive Revolution. The US has provoked passive revolutions throughout Latin America to secure the US hegemony on the continent. In the modern world, schooling is strongly linked to the construction and maintenance of hegemony. In the Brazilian case, the institutionalization of the Polyvalent Vocational School was the instrument to form a common sense of entrepreneurship, the fundamental aspect in the expansion and consolidation of US hegemony over Brazil. In addition to its psychological impact of resolving class conflicts over the middle school model, its philosophy, reflected in the curricular and organizational structure inaugurated a new educational stage in the country. The formation of an entrepreneurial mentality in the re-signified version of the Taylorist / Fordist organizational culture, a cultural aspect essentially forged in the United States of North America.