EDITORIAL

This edition of Trabalho, educação e saúde reaches its readers ten years after the middle school reform started being implemented and, thus, since changes have been being made to technical education in Brazil, a process kicked-off in 1997. By no means aiming at covering the entire historical process that involved the mentioned reform, our editorial proposal, in this issue, is to discuss both its genesis and its current repercussions.

The essay titled "From the single school to fragmented education: the National Congress in technical education reform," by Jailson Alves dos Santos, discusses the historical defeat of the single school concept that inspired the original Guideline and Base Law (GBL) project, and its substitution for the fragmented education idea. To follow-up on and analyze this process, the author investigated the political forces that confronted each other in the Brazilian Congress - in its alliance with the Executive - when technical education was regulated by decree # 2.208/97 and the consequential hegemony in the conservative liberal thought in the educational field. In the Debate section, the article called "Reform of professional education or adjusting to the flexible accumulation system?," by Acácia Kuenzer, examines the categories that currently govern the professional education policies and offering, highlighting the flexible competency arrangements, the support provided by specific legislation to the increasing privatization, and the fragmentation and loss of quality in the qualification paths. Based on this article, Celso Ferretti, Gaudêncio Frigotto, Iracy Picanço, and Marise Ramos oppose and unfold other issues, such as the contradictions between an actual lack of qualified workers and the exodus of the qualified ones to the international market; the importance of learning the concrete social movement with space for confrontation and cooptation, beyond legal program deployment formalization; reform continuity in the Lula Administration, with regard to middle and technical level professional education; and the current limits imposed on tracing a project for a sovereign nation tied to democratizing science and technology.

This edition also publishes other articles, which, although not focused on the historical analysis of the above-mentioned educational reform, deal with issues that are related to it. Anita Handfas' article, titled "The trajectory of Anped's Work & Education Workgroup: a few elements of analysis," reconstructs the history of one of the main spaces used to disseminate and produce the Marxist theory for educational research, based on an analysis of the Brazilian re-democratization period after the 1964 military coup and on the political context in which such dissemination and production occurred, problematizing, finally, the theoretical limits imposed on studies regarding work and education with reference to the Marxist theory. "Curriculum and learning: the profile of the single health system's technical schools in São Paulo," by Paulo Henrique Monteiro, analyzes the learning of the conceptual, technical, ethical and political dimensions in these educational institutions, based on the analysis of the political and pedagogical projects and on material gathered in interviews. Suze Rosa Sant'Anna, in "The influence of the education and health policies in the curricula of the mid-level technical professional education in nursing," discusses the reorganization process the mentioned types of courses underwent in the past ten years from the angle of qualifying workers who are capable of redirecting the country's health scenario. The report titled "Initiation to polytechnic education in health: a proposal to qualify health technicians," by Ana Lucia Pontes and Angélica Fonseca, surveys an experience that was aimed at building a technical discipline that would be common to distinct professional accreditations in the health field, as developed by Oswaldo Cruz Foundation's Polytechnic Health School.

Also in this edition, the magazine publishes Rosita Saupe's article titled "Building descriptors for the permanent basic care education process," which seeks, based on a quantitative approach, to collect elements to contribute to implementing and consolidating both policies. Aida Maris Peres, in "Nurse managerial competencies from the perspectives of an undergraduate nursing course and of the work market," compares the nurse managerial competencies defended in the political and pedagogical projects of the institutions that train these professionals to those that are expected by the managers who are in charge of hiring them. Article "The skill of communicating with the patient in the pharmaceutical care process," by Fabrício Possamai, identifies the factors that interfere in the communication process between pharmacists and patients, analyzing such process as a pedagogical one and, thus, crucial to Pharmaceutical Care.

The magazine also publishes an interview with professor Miguel Márquez and two abstracts on Da nova LDB ao Fundeb: por uma outra política educacional, by Hajime Nozaki and Jehu Serrado Junior; and A ciência como profissão: médicos, bacharéis e cientistas no Brasil (1895-1935), by Márcia Barros da Silva.

Jailson Alves dos Santos

Guest Editor

Carla Macedo Martins

Angélica Ferreira Fonseca

Isabel Brasil

Editorial coordination

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 Oct 2012
• Date of issue
  Nov 2007