Human Formation of Young People and Adults in Brazil: Proposal for and Evaluation of a Curriculum Component

Abstract

The article is based on the idea of human formation in its broadest sense, which includes the formation of the senses, corporeality, habits and practices, emotional life, the cultivation of relationships and of reflection on the existential meaning of the singular human life. It is assumed that the postulate is accepted that education is a specific and intentional process of human formation, with the same wide-ranging formative objectives of such formation. The article situates this understanding of education in the Brazilian educational field and presents a curriculum component designed to promote the human formation of young people and adults in technological training establishments in Brazil, over 18 weekly meetings of three hours each. This curriculum component was implemented and evaluated with 206 students from different technological courses by means of pre-and post-testing with a questionnaire, using a Likert technique, drawn up especially for this research study. It is designed to gauge (a) the understanding of relationships and emotions, (b) the understanding and cultivation of the virtues, and (c) the predisposition to take responsible decisions and actions. The results showed a statistically significant difference in the three subscales between pre and post-testing, with the higher scores being achieved in the latter.

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“…In the light of this conception, emotional education fully emerges even although some authors' views on what this concept means varies (Goleman, 1995;Mayer & Salovey, 1997;Mota, 2010;Cordeiro, Policarpo Jr., Mota, Wanderley, 2014) and is made legitimate as a fundamental aspect of human formation because it is anchored in one of the aspects that intrinsically constitute the being on whom such formation is targeted. Emotional education is not, therefore, in any shape or form, foreign to education, but is rather an integral part of the educational desideratum that unfolds from the intrinsic constitution of the human, insofar as it targets that a human being has become familiar with his/her impulses, aggressiveness, longing to relate to others and has been endowed with the necessary skills to coexist among human beings in the world of plurality, in an integrated and non-violent way with him/herself and others.…”