Official documents intended to reorient the training provided to health professionals in Brazil were used as a source to a survey conducted to determine what such documents report as innovative educational principles. This survey aimed to clarify the connection between these principles and a certain educational line, problematizing the theoretical and methodological origins of the current framework for vocational education at the undergraduate level in the area. The reorientation of health training is expressed in different official initiatives: the National Curriculum Guidelines for undergraduate courses, the National Policy for Continuing Education in the Health, and in the Pro-Health program. The educational principles widely cited in the documents were analyzed: meaningful learning, the facilitator teacher, learning to learn, and active methodologies. Based on the study of the Brazilian theoretical production on the theoretical and practical educational lines, we compared the educational principles from those documents. In conclusion, the educational principles presented are connected to theoretical and methodological benchmarks ofnon-directive pedagogies, which, when contextualized, are inserted, temporally, into in the early years of the twentieth century, focusing on the proposals for child education.
vocational training in health; active methodologies; non-directive pedagogies