A qualidade social da educação superior no contexto emergente dos Institutos Federais: uma abordagem na perspectiva da política pública

Abstract

In 2008, an institution responsible for aggregating education, science and technology in the formation of citizens appears within the perspective of public policy based on the values of social justice, equity and combats the structural vulnerabilities of Brazilian society. Thus we have constituted a new educational arrangement created by the bias of Professional and Technological Education as strategic element in the development of the nation, then the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology emerges. This new institutionality has in its articulation with Higher Education the operationalization of the fundamentals of integral human formation; the development of citizenship; work as an educational principle; besides the understanding of the student as a product and producer of knowledge. Inevitably, issues related to the quality of education emerge latently in the organic and dynamic context of Higher Education. Here we do not refer to quality within an intuitive perspective, we focus our efforts on understanding a particular type of quality, the social quality of education. A typology little explored in the Brazilian educational context, but extremely necessary in the scenario of fighting and facing the inequalities that we experience in the country. The thesis presented here seeks to reveal the phenomenon of the social quality of education in the context of the emerging context of Higher Education from the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology. Within a qualitative approach, we use the combination of documentary and bibliographic research as methodological strategies in the production of data; the analysis of the data was carried out through the bias of critical studies, substantiated by the discursive textual analysis. Discussions on the quality of education, social justice, public policy and social vulnerability were incorporated into our analyzes, based on the understanding of historical-dialectical materialism, the concepts of field and habitus and historical-critical pedagogy. As results of the investigation, we can highlight the development of the notion of emerging context from the specific needs of the institutional arrangement of the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology guided by transversality, territoriality and verticality; the multifactorial nature of the concept of social quality in education, which is difficult to measure along with official documents/standards due to the lack of explanation, even though its presence in State public policy brought with Federal Law nº 11.892/2008 was identified; its historical-philosophical foundations are linked to a perspective of integral formation with a strong marxist inspiration of social overcoming the context of capital accumulation and exploitation of human frailties; and also the construction of social quality indicators that seek to understand the institutional reality based on the assumption of democratic management and the participation of subjects.