A formação do Técnico em Agropecuária pela Escola Agrotécnica Federal de Barbacena no contexto da modernização da agricultura no Brasil (1965-1985)

Abstract

This study aims at looking into the education of the technician in agropecuary at Escola Agrotécnica Federal de Barbacena, MG, in the context of the modernization of agriculture in Brazil (1965-1985.) The main established question is whether the education of the technician in the aforementioned period was intended at modernization. The investigative efforts began, then, by the historic reconstruction of the professional agricultural education in Brazil, with a view to identifying the meaning and the function reserved to this field of teaching in the concert of professional education. It was then verified that the professional agricultural education, as well as the other fields of professional education meant, in the first years of the Republic, a social control strategy which had as its function to prepare a public which was poor and unlucky (in terms of its professional success) for the employment market. It is in the first republican period which is created the then Agricultural Apprenticeship of Barbacena , with the same purposes. In its historic trajectory, the EAFB went through a series of transformations which, in the superficiality of legal documents, were promoted for administrative reasons but which, under a hermeneutic point of view, were deliberate transformations which aimed at complying with economic issues. The recognition that economy and political interests determined the directions of education in Brazil becomes even more evident when, in the context of modernization, a system called Escola-Fazenda (school farm) was implemented, in which the pedagogical practice and production in economic conditions are mingled and direct the technician‟s education to act as an agent of modernization.