The influence of the industrial business fabric and multilateral agencies on Brazilian professional education

It is said that the Brazilian professional education reform is based on modern principles of general and professional education advocated by the World Bank and by the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean, as well as part of the Brazilian business fabric, represented by the Federation of Industries of the state of S o Paulo and the National Confederation of Industry. Based on the documents produced by these institutions as sources, the argument goes that the professional education reform – which was put into practice in the mid 1990s – absorbed the propositions of these institutions, not because of their effectiveness in bringing about qualitative change to the educational reality, but because the Brazilian government was in step with the neoliberal thinking and the implementation of policy serving the interests of the international financial capital.