Abstract
The text discusses the concept of polytechnic education within the scope of historical materialism, starting from the ontological assumptions of Marx and Engels’ thinking and the centrality of labor in the human formation. The analysis moves toward understanding the principle of union between instruction and production in the education of the working class. The Soviet educational experience and Antonio Gramsci’s educational thought acquire emphasis. Having done this theoretical and historical rescue, the theme of polytechnic education in Brazil is approached. Theoretical and policy contradictions produced in the disputes of educational projects of the working class are exposed. Particularly we discuss the proposal of Integrated Secondary Education understood, at first, as a historical form of ‘crossing’ toward the construction of polytechnism in Brazilian society, given its specificity as a concrete social formation of dependent capitalism. As final considerations, we tried to confront this conception with the hegemonic pedagogies today, outlining, then, some challenges of its theoretical-practical defense.
The human essence is not an abstraction inherent in the singular individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social relations.
—Marx (1991, p. 13)
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Notes
- 1.
In this text, the word ‘labor’ will tend to be used to express generic human production, reserving for the word ‘work’ the material production in its historical forms.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the National Research Council (CNPq) and the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Faperj) for financial support for research on the subject developed by the author.
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The author does not have any financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of this research.
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Ramos, M.N. (2023). Foundations and Challenges of Polytechnic Education. In: Hall, R., Accioly, I., Szadkowski, K. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Marxism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37252-0_6
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