This study examines the theoretical and epistemological benchmarks of education contained in the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) for the training of health professionals in Brazil. To achieve its goals, it rescues the historicity of the relationship among education, health, and society and the reform of medical education; it describes the movement of instituting the DCN for the health care area in Brazil, and discusses the relationship between the benchmark of the pedagogy of skills that underpins the DCN and the concept of the right to health formulated by the 8th National Health Conference. The results of this investigation suggest the hypothesis that, to train health professionals committed to the principles of the 8th National Health Conference and with the understanding of health as a right, it is necessary to question the limits of the pedagogy of skills adopted by the DCN as well as to build a proposal for training that converses with the assumption of social transformation, so that its didactics enables students to evolve critically from the individual and common praxis to the historical one.
professional training in health; curriculum guidelines; pedagogy of skills; philosophy of praxis