Abstract

CERQUEIRA, Maria de Fátima  and  MARTINS, Alcina Manuela de Oliveira. The consolidation of Education and Vocational Training in Secondary School in the last fifty years in Portugal. Rev. Lusófona de Educação [online]. 2011, n.17, pp.123-145. ISSN 1645-7250.

Over the last five decades we have witnessed the growing of the vocational education in the Portuguese education system. Vocational Education in Secondary Schools has become a fact, with the last reform of the curriculum in secondary education allowing a big development, due, in part, to the increasing importance and consolidation in the context of educational action. The demand for education, namely of  technical and professional characteristics, has become more intense since the Sixties - it is the phase where the theory of human capital becomes the dominant model in international education systems, focusing on the correlation between investment in education and expansion of the economy, with major consequences in Portugal, which is materialized in 1973, with the Veiga Simão Reform, who takes a decisive step to establish a program to modernize the Portuguese education system, centralizing the role of vocational training in the education system. This reform was interrupted with the fall of the political regime that followed the 25 of April, 1974 and business and technical education was extinct, with an educational policy supported on democratic principles that framed the school and its organizational culture. In the 80’s the political speech is again back to being strongly influenced by the ideology of human resources, making the vocational training an element of educational policy in Portugal. This characteristic is accentuated over the decades that follow, reflecting on the various reforms of the educational policies that, however, arise, culminating in the Reform of Secondary Education in 2004 witch objectives totally assume, in an expression never seen until then, the importance of vocational training.

Keywords : education and training; educational reform; qualifying and vocational training.

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