From the school of apprentices and craftsmen to technological professional education: a socio-historical production

This article has its genesis in a research carried out in a master’s degree course in Education, and here we present part of the studies that we developed with the aim of understanding the historical-social process of Technological Professional Education. To this end, we start from the understanding that reality is not just historical facts, but also the generalizations that people produce and share socially. About that we ask: what meanings have been produced about Professional and Technological Education? In Vygotsky (2009) we look for the basis to explain what the category of meaning and its heuristic value consists in explaining the real, but we also rely on the ideas developed by Marx (1985) Marx and Engels (2006) Saviani (1986; 2007) Manacorda (2010), Frigotto (2005; 2019) among other authors as well as legislations that discuss Professional and Technological Education in Brazil in order to, through an immersion in the history of this type of teaching, highlight the meanings produced and shared. The reflections lead us to the understanding that the meaning of professional education in Brazil has been strongly mediated by this country's social formation, especially if we consider that the model of slave production that prevailed in Colonial Brazil constituted social relations and subverted the value of practical work in a prejudiced way. This is the ideological basis that has historically constituted the framework of educational legislation and, consequently, is appropriated by society in general.