EDITORIAL

Innovative educational approaches in terms of the worker's humanization have become one of the central issues in training in the area of health. Thus, this issue of Trabalho, Educação e Saúde brings together a series of texts on the theme.

Ronaldo Rosas, in the essay "Work and aesthetical knowledge" returns to the debate about the aesthetical training of the working classes, by opposing the bourgeois ideology (ideologies) of the arts in Brazil and the type of art education proposed by the relevant legislation. As a starting point, the author suggests a recovery, in a Marxist perspective, of the origin - history - of aesthetical knowledge. The article "Integrality: a tool for the critical training of health professionals" by José Paulo da Silva and Claudia Tavares, expands the principle of integrality, seen as the basic concept underlying the changes in health work being advocated and, therefore, as an essential element in the training of workers in the area of health. Antônio Cyrino, Edy Nakamoto, Geni Rollo, Marta Andrade and Paula Freire, in the report entitled "The project 'Caring for the Carer': the experience of permanent education in health care at the Health Centre Escola de Botucatu" describe an experience of permanent education in health care that, in its development, emphasized the workers' inter-subjective and institutional relationships in a health unit, relationships that are usually ignored in current educational projects. Finally, the two texts in the section Debate - one by Claudia Marques and Estela Padilha and the other by Maria Helena Mendonça - refer to the debate on how the regulation of the (new?) profession of health community agent may problematize the principles now in force in professional education in health and in the very way health care is exercised.

It is important to note that, in most cases, these innovative educational approaches are based on an expectation of changes in the work processes that is at variance with the actual meanings taken by concrete health work relations in the contemporary world. Nevertheless, the analysis of health work processes is an essential starting point in the reflection about the context with which these educational proposals establish a dialogue or enter into conflict. Therefore, the second theme of this issue is the health work process in its most 'taylorized' dimension - the hospital one. Denise Pires, Eliane Matos and Francine Gelbcke, in the text "Work organization in nursing: implications for the work performance and life of unregistered nurses", using the relevant academic literature on nursing, show how the organization of health care is largely influenced by the logic of taylorism, in spite of the changes that have occurred to counteract this. Based on a case-study about the incorporation of new technologies in a private hospital, Maria Inês Martins, in the article "Technological transition in health work: challenges for the management of work" points to the same direction, and further indicates that the reification and standardization of technology in the area of health has led to lack of motivation and suffering at work and encouraged fragmentation, alienation and the social division of knowledge.

In this same issue, Trabalho, Educação e Saúde deals with the workers' health and its implications for education. The article "Educating workers for health in a flexible accumulation context: new challenges" by Elizabeth Araújo, discusses how the new technologies prevent the worker from perceiving the causal nexus between illnesses and the work tool, and how this raises new pedagogical questions in the field of education for health. Ligia Tumolo and Paulo Tumolo, in the article "The experience of being unemployed: a critical study of the meaning of unemployment in capitalism" analyse the process of dehumanization in the situation described in the title. We cannot but emphasize the fact that these two texts - although exploring apparently opposite facets of contemporary work - are extremely central for the field of education for health.

Atilio Borón, Executive Secretary of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) is our interviewee in this issue. In the interview, Borón deals with the issue of democracy in contemporary capitalism, especially in Latin America, and its connection with health and educational policies.

The current issue publishes three book reviews: Rosimary de Souza reviews A miragem da pós-modernidade, by Silvia Gerschman and Maria Lucia Vianna; Lucia Neves, Qualificação profissional: uma tarefa de Sísifo, by Cláudia Mattos Kober; and Maristella de Araújo, O trabalho em saúde: olhando e experenciando o SUS no cotidiano, by Emerson Merhy et al.

The Editors

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Nov 2012
• Date of issue
  Sept 2004