Professional education of construction workers: The construction site and social emancipation

The present doctoral thesis deals with the professional education of construction workers with the objective of contributing to pedagogical experiences that are alternative to their current heteronomous and oppressed work conditions, through experimental tests in the form of 'construction site - self - managed school'. These practices raised questions and revealed gaps in knowledge of the history of alternative and unitary modes of education. We have explored examples of schools and spaces for the expansion of the autonomy of the constructors as a contribution to their social and political emancipation. We wonder how we came to the current separation of professions, divided between theoretical - architects - and practices - workers. In search of their genealogy, we approach the first class based societies in antiquity and the first dual formative spaces, separating education of the elites for the direction of society - liberal and theoretical education, and the subaltern classes - practical education for work. The education of architects and builders takes place particularly in class based societies: there are societies where the formation is dual where architects learn their craft away from constructive practices, without using their work force, to create "architects without construction", and The builders apprehend their work in the workshops, without controlling the production of architecture, in a dialectical relationship dominated by architects. In other societies, the formation of architects is due to the physical-corporal practical experience in the material production of architecture, when they develop the office of drawing, and in representation, it is at the construction site that they form "architects with construction", of popular origin. They are autonomous professionals who idealize and build. In the invasion of the Americas by Europeans the elites trained enslaved people to build with European aesthetics. They erected buildings with heteronomous work, oppressed and exploited. With the advance of productive forces in the nineteenth century, they created assistencial Liceus, to "qualify" builders with the support of Italian workers. In this period - 1870 to 1914, São Paulo - we verified that they did not realize that the broad and autonomous artistic qualification of the builders would result in mobilizations for labor rights. When they realized it, they refused the Italian anarchists and the capomastri collectivists builders of the São Paulo eclecticism, sponsoring technology that excludes the worker from creation: the reinforced concrete. There is a period of disqualification and training of the worker. "National System" is created, and in 1964 the civilian military coup has place, and lasts until 1988. With redemocratization, self-managed formative experiences and socializing public policies are extended to 2016 - year of media-partisan coup of the elites. These 28 years have generated experiences of "education of workers by workers", as rehearsed in the "construction site school" with popular movement, the MST, and university, USP. We built the 'house of arts' at the ENFF - Guararema, with agro-ecological construction techniques and a 'public gallery' at the Chemical Park - São Bernardo do Campo, with compensatory urban drainage techniques. The essays practiced the idiosyncrasies of the libertarian education of construction workers perceived in the survey of the historical process. This experience allowed us to identify the contemporaries 'construction site schools' fall within the traditional lines of people`s action for the emancipation of the class.