The historical contexts of the implementation of technical education in Brazil: a case study concerning the Federal University of Santa Maria

Abstract

This study aims, based on a bibliographic review and relevant documentary analyses, to reflect on the national and international historical processes that stimulated the implementation of technical education at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM).  It assumes the principle of the correlation of historical facts, grounded in authors from the historical-dialectical materialist tradition, in order to establish reflections on the historical framework that influenced the implementation of technical education within UFSM, the first Federal University established in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, as well as comparing this perspective with other thinkers representing different approaches. In this sense, it becomes evident that the decades of the 1950s and 1960s were marked by the reorganization of the capitalist productive model, a period when new parameters for global agricultural production were established, through the high mechanization of crops, the use of agricultural pesticides, seeds, and the adoption of new cultivation techniques. Furthermore, it is observed that it was within this context of Cold War polarization that Brazil effectively defined its role in relation to the new demands of capitalism, resulting, for example, in the “MEC-USAID” agreement and the establishment of new educational guidelines, in a scenario of the implementation of the civil-military dictatorship, whose governments articulated the mechanisms for reconfiguring the relations between capital and labor.