Curso superior de tecnologia para quem? – reflexões acerca da política de ampliação e diversificação da educação profissional tecnológica brasileira
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article discusses the institutionalization of technologist degree in Brazil, focusing on its socio-historical determinants and its economic, political, and social implications. The starting hypothesis is that this academic degree has been structured in Brazil as a kind of higher education with reduced hours, a lean and flexible curriculum, aimed primarily at the black population segment, low income, and from urban peripheries. Its objective is to analyze the socio-historical determinants of the policy of expanding and diversifying opportunities for technological vocational education in Brazil that gave rise to Technology Degree Courses (TDCs), and their socio-economic and political implications. This is basic research, of analysis grounded in historical-dialectical materialism, whose objectives give it an explanatory character, and which uses primary and secondary sources for data collection (government documents, documents from supranational organizations, statistical data, institutional websites, legal instruments, etc.). The analysis indicates that TDCs have established themselves as a lean and flexible higher education degree, an alternative to bachelor's and licentiate degrees, offered mainly in private higher education institutions, in the distance learning modality, whose target audience is young people aged 18 to 29 mobilized by the ideology of employability, entrepreneurship and sustainability. It is observed that TDCs are guided by a pragmatic, immediate, and self-interested perspective of human development and, more than training technologists, have assumed a relevant role in shaping the ethical and moral aspects of the populational segment served, so that their greatest potential is the construction of consensus around the normalization of the impacts of unemployment and precariousness work and social life. It concludes that the expansion and diversification of vocational and technological education reveal an updated duality in education, maintaining university-level academic training for the most privileged and tertiary education, with a pragmatic, immediatist, and market interest perspective, for Black and poor people from the urban peripheries.
Source: Acta Scientiarum Education
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7203837192