Education
October 13, 2025
OECD, Brazil and the directions of technical education: convergences and dichotomies
Creativity is fundamental to balancing global patterns and local realities
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) emerged in the post-war period as an international forum to align reconstruction and development policies among industrialized countries. Its institutional objective has always been to formulate policies based on evidence, internationally comparable and adjusted to standards of efficiency and competitiveness. In the field of education, this ethos translated, from the 1990s onwards, into guidelines for Vocational and Technical Education (VET), in line with the challenges of the global labour market.
The OECD advocates seven axes for VET:
1. Relevance for the job market;
2. Flexibility and lifelong learning;
3. Articulation with general and higher education;
4. Work-based training;
5. Quality and governance;
6. Inclusion and equity;
7. Competencies for the 21st century.
These objectives seek to prepare citizens capable of “learning to learn”, but, by emphasizing employability, they carry the risk of relegating cultural dimensions, Goodson (2013) reminds us.
In Brazil, the trajectory of Professional and Technological Education (EPT) reveals a strong dialogue with these guidelines. Decree No. 2,208/1997 established the separation between high school and technical education, reinforcing the immediate employability bias, in line with the OECD’s pragmatism. It was revoked by Decree No. 5,154/2004, which made this logic more flexible by reintroducing the possibility of integration between general and technical training. In practice, this avoids early channeling into technical or occupational routes that can fragment pathways and define biographies.
Starting in 2007, programs such as Professionalized Brazil and the expansion of the Federal Institutes evidenced the attempt to structure Vocational Education and Training (VET) on a national scale, creating the National Catalog of Technical Courses, which translates the demand for international standards of quality and transparency into Brazilian language. The National Education Plan (2014–2024), in its Goal 11, sought to expand High School integrated with vocational education, in line with international guidelines. More recently, law no. 14.645/2023 established the formulation of the National Policy for Professional and Technological Education (PNEPT), consolidated by decree no. 12.603/2025, which created the SINAEPT (National System for the Evaluation of VET). The agenda for governance, quality, and inclusion is thus formally established.
If we look only at the normative milestones, Brazil seems to align almost millimeter by millimeter with the OECD roadmap: employability, flexibility, articulation, governance, inclusion, and quality. The convergence is notorious and, in terms of regulation, glaring gaps would hardly be found.
However, the acronyms reveal something.
The acronym VET (Vocational Education and Training), within the OECD framework, emphasizes training focused on immediate employability , prioritizing technical skills demanded by the market and reinforcing the logic of the school-to-work transition. In Brazil, on the other hand, EPT (Professional and Technological Education), provided for in the LDB and regulated by decree no. 5.154/2004, is conceived as an education that articulates work, science, technology, and culture, integrating with general education and seeking to overcome a merely instrumental view.
Although there are convergences — such as the emphasis on curricular flexibility, lifelong learning, and the articulation between technical education and basic education —, significant differences are also evident. While VET tends to operate on a pragmatic logic adaptive to the global market, EPT, in its normative formulation, claims a comprehensive formative character, in line with the critique of authors such as Saviani (2007), who advocate for education as an omnilateral social practice, and Frigotto (2010), who questions the subordination of school to economic rationality.
Thus, if VET translates a tradition of policies oriented by parameters of competitiveness and social cohesion, EPT emerges in the Brazilian context as a space of dispute: it can either be reduced to a strictly instrumental and repetitive training, as Frigotto warns, or constitute a path of critical emancipation through integral formation, as Saviani defends.
The tensions
The problem becomes evident in practice. The OECD recognizes, at least in its reference documents (Skills Outlook, Education Policy Outlook), the importance of critical and creative skills. But, as Freire (1996) warns, education tends to be instrumentalized when it is limited to responding to market logic.
In Brazil, the asymmetry between norm and reality is persistent: the rhetoric of flexibility coexists with rigid curricula; the promise of inclusion clashes with deep regional inequalities; the articulation with higher education often becomes a social funnel, where only a few manage to continue their studies.
Mantoan (2015) reminds that inclusion is not just access, but structural reorganization. The promise of equity in Brazil is often reduced to unsupported vacancies, falling into formalism.
Another point of tension is the emphasis on work-based learning. In European countries, up to 45% of VET students have strong practical experience in companies, according to data from the OECD’s Spotlight on Vocational Education and Training report (2023). In Brazil, internships are precarious and fragile, training young people who perform tasks without understanding their full meaning.
Here comes the central point of the analysis. The OECD proposes a “future-ready” training, flexible and creative. Brazil, in its recent legislation, echoes this discourse. However, in concrete reality, EPT finds itself subjected to pragmatism: rapidly training technicians for dominant sectors of the local economy. This is an efficient logic for immediate labor absorption, but which, as Bourdieu (1998) points out, reinforces social reproduction: sons of miners remain miners, sons of farmers remain farmers, even if better trained and perhaps with better pay.
It is at this point that alternative proposals, such as the “parallel tracks” of humanistic and entrepreneurial training, gain relevance. Papert (1980) already argued that creativity arises in environments of experimentation; Resnick (2017) reinforces that projects, passion, peers, and play-thinking, the 4Ps, are central to meaningful learning. By integrating philosophy, art, and entrepreneurship into technical training, Brazil could not only meet the OECD guidelines but also redefine them. Instead of copying external models, create a truly inclusive and emancipatory VET, in which the student learns both to perform technical tasks and to reflect critically on their meaning — and to imagine possible alternatives.
Art
It is within this horizon that art as applied creativity gains centrality. This is not about artistic education in the traditional sense — gluing, painting, etc. — but about art that stimulates the brain to reinterpret the manual, to truly learn how to learn. Art is the differentiator between copy and original, reproduction and creation.
Art enables thought to reflect, propose, and innovate; it would be natural for it to occupy a central space in curricula. However, it remains relegated to a few weekly classes, fragmented teacher training, and devaluation of the discipline, resulting in unsafe and often bureaucratic or recreational practices.
The issue is that creativity is also a factor in long-term employability, a skill totally connected to being future-ready. AI, for example, is a mirror of the user’s capacity and its performance will be all the better the more powerful the mental resources of its user are. In this context, the art of dialogue becomes fundamental for future professions, a kind of “new computational language”, since the prompts need to be formulated and managed with objectivity, clarity, and originality to achieve the goals.
Own paths
Brazil is formally aligned with the OECD guidelines for technical education, as the analysis points out. The legislative history confirms: employability, flexibility, articulation, inclusion, governance, and 21st-century skills are on paper. However, implementation reveals a dichotomy: the instrumental dimension (training labor) prevails, while the emancipatory dimension (training critical citizens) remains peripheral.
The Brazilian challenge is twofold:
1. Do not reject international parameters, but reinterpret them in light of their social, cultural, and historical aspects;
2. Avoid the uncritical adoption of external models, often applied by consultants without mediation with the Brazilian reality.
Precisely in this second point lies a new tension. Foreign consultants work in public agencies unfamiliar with the Brazilian language and culture. Under the rhetoric of cooperation, their performance is effectively reduced to the implementation of external policies, after which they return to their countries taking with them formal indicators of compliance.
As Freire (1996) recalls, education is a practice of freedom, not just adaptation. It is up to Brazil to evaluate universal goals and create local mediations that preserve the uniqueness of students.
It is in this space of tension — between global standards and local realities — that it will be decided whether Brazilian technical education will be merely functional or truly emancipatory. Creativity will be fundamental.
Who wrote this column
Roberto Munhoz
