CIDADÃO TRABALHADOR: REFLEXÕES SOBRE A FORMAÇÃO CIDADÃ DOS ESTUDANTES DA EDUCAÇÃO PROFISSIONAL E TECNOLÓGICA INTEGRADA AO ENSINO MÉDIO DA REDE PÚBLICA DO CEARÁ

Abstract

The 1988 Federal Constitution established education as a fundamental human right and assigned the State the responsibility for ensuring its implementation, guiding it toward the exercise of citizenship and the development of job skills. Subsequently, Decree No. 5,154/2004 established Professional and Technological Education integrated into high school, recognized as a form of basic education by Law No. 11,741/2008. In the context of Ceará, Law No. 14,273/2008 created the State Schools of Professional Education with the aim of promoting comprehensive, technical, and civic education. However, these institutions operate amid contradictions, for although they aim to overcome the duality between manual and intellectual labor, they incorporate performance-oriented management models grounded in Socio-Educational Business Technology, which introduces business principles into the educational field. Thus, this article aims to reflect on the civic education offered in Professional and Technological Education integrated into high school in the public school system of Ceará, analyzing the socioeconomic and political determinants that link workforce training to the exercise of citizenship. To this end, a qualitative approach is adopted, involving bibliographic and documentary analysis, guided by the dialectical method and grounded in the contributions of Saviani (2013), whose historical-critical pedagogy conceives of work as an educational principle and advocates for the omnilateral formation of individuals, linking work, science, and culture as mediators for human emancipation; of Marcuse (1979), who, in criticizing technological rationality in advanced industrial society, highlights how technology can operate as an instrument of domination, producing conformism and restricting autonomy; and Adorno (1995), who conceives of education as a space of tension between adaptation and emancipation, advocating the formation of critical consciousness as a condition for resistance to instrumental reason and the reproduction of social structures. The results indicate that, although the legal framework reaffirms work as an educational principle and upholds the perspective of integral human formation, there are shifts that signal setbacks, expressed in the heightened focus on the development of competencies and skills. This orientation raises concerns regarding the instrumentalization of education for the working classes, directing it toward the training of a workforce tailored to market demands, without consistently ensuring the conditions for the critical and conscious exercise of citizenship.