Industrialisation, Knowledge Economies and Educational Change: A Note on Argentina and Brazil

Abstract

This chapter will discuss, by describing aspects of Brazil and Argentina in the period 1950–1990, some of the ways in which economic ideas, ideologies and systems are related to educational systems. The theme of the chapter, at its broadest, is a puzzle about whether the patterns of educational systems in Brazil and Argentina are directly deducible from two discourses – one about the nature of the ‘industrial society’ and the other about the nature of the ‘knowledge economy’. Both these discourses had their roots in international debates, but, it will be suggested, they were both made local, and contextualised, and became different. In other words they were both ‘domesticated’ in different ways in Brazil and Argentina. Clearly the terms ‘industrial society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ have ordinary – that is, academic – meanings. They are not merely political slogans, or the labels for policies. So there is some point – before moving on – in stabilising the routine academic meaning for both terms. They can be located in mainstream (and well-known) academic literature. The concept of ‘industrial society’ was well sketched in a classic text of the 1960s: Modern industrial societies are distinguished in their structure and development from others of comparable complexity, principally by the institutionalization of innovation – that is to say, by the public and private organization, on an increasingly large scale, of scientifi c research in the service of economic and military growth. (Halsey et al., 1961: 2) In other words, the academic concept, here as used by sociologists, refl ects a shift in an industrial economy from manual to technical and scientifi c skills, a change which has serious implications for the kind of qualifi cations required by students entering the job market. Traditional forms of education, in which bodies of skilled craftsmen, aided by labourers or apprentices, work under the supervision of foremen, yield to a more complex structure and are turned to the new objectives of the modern economy. Thus, from this academic and sociological perspective, educational systems might become similar because of industrialisation. There is an implicit ‘convergence’