
Conception of omnilateral human development in vocational education integrated to secondary school: Contradictions and resistance in
IFRO’s Institutional Development Plan (PDI)
RPGE – Revista on line de Política e Gestão Educacional, Araraquara, v. 30, n. 00, e026046, 2026. e-ISSN: 1519-9029
DOI: 10.22633/rpge.v30i00.21196 16
appears disconnected from the premises of a counter-hegemonic pedagogy or work from an
ontological perspective. It is important to note, however, that the critique is not directed at the
training of students for the world of work, but at the reduction of the educational purpose to the
immediate or to work solely as an economic practice, thereby undermining IFRO’s role in the
appropriation of science, culture, art, politics, and work in their entirety.
Similarly, the 2009 PDI includes terms such as “employability” (IFRO, 2009, p. 31) and
“development of competencies and skills” (IFRO, 2009, p. 44), which indicates a closer
alignment with the perspective of learning for employability than with the concept of
omnilateral education, given that these terms are recurrent in the formulations of competency-
based pedagogy and are historically associated with the individual’s adaptation to the demands
of the labor market, rather than with their emancipation. Omnilateral education, however,
presupposes full development, which integrates dimensions of human life such as work,
science, and culture (Ramos, 2008a), requiring the appropriation of scientific, artistic, and
philosophical knowledge linked to the totality of social practices, rather than merely the
acquisition of operational skills geared toward employability. Thus, by adopting vague
language with no coherent connection to the philosophical-pedagogical foundations of
emancipatory education, IFRO’s initial PDI reproduces elements of technocratic logic,
particularly due to the absence of proposals for more consistent curricular mediation.
The same passage on the philosophical principles of human formation, linked to the four
pillars of education for the 21st century, was repeated in the 2014 and 2019 Institutional
Development Plans (PDIs), indicating a greater alignment with hegemonic pedagogies and a
departure from the foundational principles of polytechnic and omnilateral higher education
institutions, as discussed by Pacheco (2010). Also in the 2014 and 2018 PDIs, expressions/terms
such as: “a set of skills and competencies that foster the construction of knowledge” (IFRO,
2014, p. 94), “competencies necessary for training for the world of work” (IFRO, 2018, p. 67),
course offerings tailored to the needs of the “labor market” (IFRO, 2014, p. 95; 2018, p. 82),
and “use of active teaching methodologies” (IFRO, 2009, p. 26; 2014, p. 79; 2018, p. 61).
Despite retaining passages that indicate a closer alignment with hegemonic pedagogies,
in its second version, the 2014 PDI adopted a discourse closer to the concept of holistic
education, reaffirming the principles at the genesis of the RFEPCT, such as “the inseparability
of teaching, research, and extension” and “work as an educational principle” as a structuring
element of the curriculum (IFRO, 2014, p. 81). In further describing the conception of the
curriculum and its structuring elements, the document presents ontological and sociopolitical