Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

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The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept of education in the professional qualification projects undertaken by the 'Valer,' the Corporate University of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (currently Vale). The control over the workers' training takes-on a strategic role that is aimed at optimizing organizational results. However, under market pressure, the increase in the supply of schooling to meet the demands imposed by productive restructuring is far from a perspective of providing omnilateral qualification; rather, it is marked by the logic of immediatism and instrumentalization and adheres to the organizational culture and to capturing subjectivity. From the viewpoint of the competencies that are required to perform the tasks, work has been deteriorating and, with it, the workers. The investigation is endorsed by historical materialism, which bears the task of unveiling the fragmented, articulated reality via common sense. We used the Analysis of Discourse (AD) as an analytical instrument.

This article reports on a teaching experience carried out with technical education students at Fiocruz's Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health (EPSJV/Fiocruz). This experience, which lasted one semester, focused on "Community Health Agents (CHA) - policy, qualification, and work," and aimed to provide the students with an introduction to research following the proposal of initiation to EPSJV's polytechnic education in health. Students and educators analyzed the CHA qualification and work policies and had a chance to discuss the issue with researchers involved in this area and with CHAs. The outcome of the work was the production of a documentary video and the collective preparation of this report. This introductory work in research repositioned students and educators away from the standard condition of "wise master" and "ignorant apprentice," and gave them the chance to break away from the banking model of education and to gain an critical view of the learning process and of the study's object.

This article focuses on the analysis of a civil construction cooperative guided by the principles of solidary economy. The goal was to understand to what extent this associative experience, in addition to building a strategy of survival and of resistance to unemployment and underemployment, can contribute to the invention of new forms of work and of life that can produce health. A qualitative study was carried out to get to know the main issues involved in the cooperative productive process, its economic and technical viability, and the relationships established among the members. It was found that the project breaks away from the habitual logic of work that is deployed at construction sites, that it invests in worker qualification, and expands a new qualification sense, one of sharing, of associated feeling, and of social commitment to the local community. In spite of the limitations derived from the lack of funding compatible with the specificity of initiatives of this nature, it is an exemplary reference of success under the premises of the solidary economy.

Globalization and neoliberalism generated a precarization of work, one which has had consequences for everyone. "Productivism," based on the capitalistic production mode, brings to scene a new way to manage human resources in companies. This new management is composed of a series of requirements, translated by the managers, in everyday life, as increased pressure to achieve goals and personalized impositions for growing quantitative results. Combined, this has caused a brutal change in the workplace - understood as a set of conditions that are external and internal to the workplace and its connections to the workers' health. These changes render the work environment a hostile, inhumane place and, thus, qualitatively unbalanced with abrupt effects on the workers' mental health, since employe-es spend most of their lives developing interpersonal and social relations at work. Therefore, their quality of life is largely dependent on the quality of their work environment. It is in this environment, marked by quantitative performance and target-reaching pressures, and by the workers' depersonalization - treated as an object of production - that the socalled mobbing takes place, a process of extreme psychological violence against the worker that causes a series of psychological damages to them.

No matter what the starting point for this experience called thought, the development and existence of thought take on the shape of an event. Just as there cannot be an event without spectators, a thought depends on the person to whom it is addressed; even if precariously and temporarily, I become, for myself, the figure of this other person. Thus, if human beings are 'made of the world,' human thought is made of words which, created in and by this world, lead, in turn, to the world of meanings and what they signify to us. As such, perhaps one of the first tasks of philosophical reflection on education is to contribute to questioning the meanings and distorsions of meaning that trends, or simple routine, impose on words. In this article, among the many occurrences that could be mentioned, the goal was to examine the notion of 'category,' the path of which seems to be especially illustrative of the risks that dogmatic use can impose on reflection.

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