INTRODUCTION

Middle-Level Technical Professional Education (EPTNM) in Brazil is crossed by a historical dispute in the educational field, regarding its dualistic formative and systemic structure. In the analytical axis that deals with discussions in the field of Work and Education, polytechnic education and unitary school are at the base of the problematizations against dual school, when considering the centrality of the work category and its historicity in the capitalist production mode and for understanding education as a historically constituent of human formation, see the legacy of the Working Group representative of that field in ANPEd. The affiliation of the text with the field of Work and Education problematizes the ideological cement promoted by the economic conception of education, its contradictions and mediations posed by educational policy guidelines, and in view of the objective conditions of Brazilian social formation and the current political and economic context that established significant changes in the work world (^{ANTUNES, 2018}; ^{ALVES, 2013}). Furthermore, it conceives the contradictory character of EPTNM in view of determinations that imply duality of the educational system and the formation of the Brazilian workforce, mostly focused on simple labor.

From the perspective of the ruling class, on which the economic conception of education (human capital) is based, EPTNM is lifted to a condition of redemption of Brazilian ailments, as it is supported by assumptions that bring “unappealable” evidence that EPTNM is able to leverage the country's economic and social development, since it would “naturally” generate greater productivity for the economic sectors and a faster and more compensatory financial return rate for those who are willing to obtain such training.

In this regressive framework, it is understood that the premise (and the promise) that underlies the economic conception of education - which establishes a causal relationship between extended schooling years with improvement in income and work conditions for the working class and the country's economic social development - is not confirmed in the face of concrete reality. This premise proves to be wrong because this conception tries to explain the economic base through processes that touch it, such as education, for example. In this way, education becomes a determining pole to explain why the country does not reach a certain level of economic development. In our view, this is an inversion that seeks to justify that the deleterious effects of poor development are explained by insufficient or inadequate qualification of the workforce and not that the processes of exclusion and inclusion of workers in the market are organically linked to the process of production and reproduction of capital from certain historical circumstances, as will be shown in the next section.

Other determinations are brought about by the contradictions of the current historical situation. Within the scope of public education policies, since the 1990s, the expansion of schooling in the Brazilian population and the broader access of the popular strata at all levels of schooling are well known. However, this process has been taking place at a juncture that affects material expressions in work relations through precariousness, fragmentation, informality and uncertainties and that have been affecting young workers in particular.

In Brazil, EPTNM in the integrated modality (an explanation of the modalities will appear later) is predominantly offered in public schools. It is a formative conception that has been quite successful in the processes of large-scale assessment and entrance into higher education, especially in federal institutions. Although the public that occupies the vacancies of these institutions is not exclusively from the most impoverished strata of the working class and do not necessarily want to obtain technical qualifications to work in their area of training, it is necessary to consider that there is a significant contingent of the working class that aspires a most immediate entrance into the labor market and which yearns for better job positions, in view of the specialized qualification in a given economic activity. In this perspective, EPTNM establishes a crossroads for these students, because, at the same time that this technical training involves the pressing need for entering the labor market, depending on material and subjective conditions, professional insertion can delay and even suppress the yearning to enter higher education.

Therefore, the central question posed within the scope of this article is to understand how students in the process of professional training are realizing their future possibilities of entering the labor market, especially by identifying elements that influence their formative choice and, consequently, their school trajectory. To this end, the text is organized as follows: I) it presents an overview of policies concerning professional education and the work world; II) a report of the results of the field research aimed at understanding the motivations, perceptions and expectations of EPTNM students about professional training and entry into the work world; and III) final considerations.

As a support for the analysis of students' motivations, perceptions and expectations, the contributions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and Pierre Bourdieu (each in their own way) were used as interlocutors that individuals’ consciousness is strongly influenced by material relations of production and the place individuals occupy in it. It should be added that the results of other researchers with similar investigations in the field of Work and Education and Sociology of Education were compared for interpreting the present authored research.

OVERVIEW OF POLICIES ON PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION AND THE WORK WORLD IN BRAZIL: OBVIOUS CONTRADICTIONS

It is understood as clarifying that the reference to Professional Education refers to chapter III of the Guidelines and Bases of National Education Law No. 9.394/1996 (^{BRASIL, 1996}), originally called “Of Professional Education” and later significantly changed on account of Law No. 11.741/2008 (BRASIL, 2008), which gave a new dimension to the educational modality, including changing the title of the chapter to “On Professional and Technological Education”. Basically, the LDB chapter comprises articles 39 to 42 and covers different levels and modalities of professional and technological education³. Its structure includes courses at three levels of complexity: initial and continuing education, generally linked to professional qualification courses; Middle-Level Technical Education; and undergraduate and graduate professional technological education. Such levels of complexity in the studies won these nomenclatures in Decree nº 5.154/2004 (BRASIL, 2004), as will be described below.

Undergraduate and graduate Professional Technological Education is offered only to those who have completed high school and have rules that regulate their workload, objectives and other specificities, based on the sectors and areas of economic activity. Initial and continuing education, on the other hand, is offered in conjunction with the education of young people and adults and aims to increase worker qualification, although its certification does not confer a degree that allows to ascend in regular schooling. Such a prerogative makes initial and continuing education free from curriculum regulation because it is a non-formal educational modality (^{CARNEIRO, 2015}).

Middle-Level Technical Professional Education (EPTNM), which this article deals with, can be offered in three ways: integrated, concurrent and subsequent. The first covers those students who have the same enrollment in the same institution, both in high school and professional training with integrated curriculum. The second form deals with that student who attends both levels of education at the same time, in different institutions or in the same institution, but with different enrollment, without course integration. The third concerns students who are taking Professional Education but have already finished high school.

EPTNM data shows that between 2002 and 2018, the number of enrollments more than tripled. The School Census of 2002, the last year of the then president Fernando Henrique Cardoso's term, the technical middle-level courses reached 565,042 enrollments. In 2007, the beginning of Lula da Silva's second term in the Presidency, there were 682,431 enrollments. The 2018 data, on the other hand, show that there are 1,868,817 enrollments in Brazil (INEP, 2003; INEP, 2008; INEP, 2019), which means that around 10.6% of high school students in Brazil are enrolled in some technical course in professional education⁴.

Due to the relative quantity that is considered very low by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (according to the OECD report, the countries that make up the Organization have an average of 44% of secondary education), since the 2000s, the federal government has launched initiatives aimed at expanding EPTNM. In the motto of the launch in 2007 of the Education Development Plan (PDE), which advocated joint initiatives between federal entities, the Public Call MEC/SETEC n. 002/2007 welcomed proposals to support the implementation of new federal institutions of Professional and Technological Education, through a partnership between MEC and municipal managers. In this way, municipalities would receive a teaching unit and should provide physical space for the construction of the school and other actions that would make its implementation feasible, justified by an investment strategy that combined education, economic development and territoriality. Also in the context of the PDE inception, the Brasil Profissionalizado program was launched, with a view to stimulating secondary education integrated with Professional Education in state education networks, through the provision of resources for the expansion of their own network (^{CAIRES and OLIVEIRA, 2016}).

The following year, through Law 11,892/2008, the Federal Network for Professional, Scientific and Technological Education was established, which resulted in the creation of 38 Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology from the merger of the Federal Technological Education Centers (CEFETs), federal agrotechnical schools, and technical schools linked to federal universities. From the construction of 150 schools foreseen in the MEC/SETEC Call plus 208 technical schools by the end of the 2011-2014 period, a total of 562 campuses in Brazil were intended to be reached, numbers that are uncertain to be obtained. However, it is certain that the budget for Professional and Technological Education was increased from R$2.2 billion in 2003 to R$9 billion in 2013 (^{SANTOS and RODRIGUES, 2015}), which denoted the prioritization of investment for this modality of education.

Despite the significant growth in the 16-year period, it is registered that the peak of enrollments at EPTNM in Brazil was 2014, with 1,886,167 enrollments, that is, precisely the end of the investment period of expansion of the Federal Network. That year, the National Education Plan (PNE 2014-2024) was enacted, which stipulated goal 11, a specific goal for the number of EPTNM enrollments to be tripled by the end of the decade and that at least 50% (fifty percent) of the expansion to be offered in the public segment (BRASIL, 2014). This goal considers the role of the Federal Institutes and in the state public education networks as strategic, although it also matches the forecast for expansion of EPTNM through private entities of Sistema S. Therefore, in absolute numbers, this goal implies that, in 2024, the Brazilian educational system will reach almost five million enrollments, in view of the 1,666,138 enrollments in 2013, the reference year for the current PNE. Judging by the number of enrollments since PNE was in force, the envisaged expansion does not indicate that it will be achieved⁵.

It is important to contextualize that such political orientations took place in a context in which Brazil had reached a higher level of economic growth, with the creation of new jobs and greater formalization in the employment relationship, which, consequently, generated a growing clamor that Professional Education should be further expanded to support a virtuous cycle. In this sense, the predominant discursive framework was that, on the one hand, technical courses would meet the aspirations of the working class children, especially from the lower classes, to have access to more qualified training and to put them in better conditions to sell their workforce. On the other hand, it would also meet the demands of the business community, which propagated the discourse that a “blackout of labor” was occurring in Brazil, which, from the point of view of the companies, would have created difficulties to hire a qualified workforce to take the available positions.

In this context, at the initiative of the federal government, Law No. 12,513/2011 instituted Pronatec (National Program for Access to Technical Education and Employment) as an attempt to consolidate the expansion of the Network itself. Other initiatives were also part of this policy, such as offering scholarships to students and workers (Bolsa Formação), financing for private educational entities (Fies Técnico/Fies Empresa), free agreement with Sistema S, support for expansion of state networks of professional education and distance learning (e-Tec), all of them coordinated by the Ministry of Education Secretariat of Professional and Technological Education (^{CASSIOLATO and GARCIA, 2014}).

Pronatec, despite predicting an increase in the expansion of the Federal Network itself, prioritized the provision of scholarships for students and workers in private educational institutions. Between 2011 and 2014, Pronatec reached eight million enrollments, under the condition that 92% of the resources used in the budgetary action 20RW (support for professional, scientific and technological training) were allocated to Sistema S⁶, which totaled an amount of R$5.88 billion for this business organization (^{COSTA, 2015}), a finding reiterated by ^{Motta and Frigotto (2017}), who reached similar numbers. Another assertion regarding the program was that, between 2011 and 2014, Pronatec, when reaching the initially set goal of 8 million enrollments, did so with the proportion of 2.3 million (28%) in EPTNM courses (minimum of 800 hours) and 5.8 million (72%) in Initial and Continuing Training courses (FIC - on average, 160-hour courses). These data show the fragility of the discourse that presupposes a causal link between education and economic development, since most of the enrollments in the Program were destined to quick and simple training courses, with low added value.

Under the presidential term of Michel Temer, as of May 2016, the federal government announced two measures to restructure Pronatec: the Progredir plan, which consisted of offering 160-hour professional qualification distance courses, under the pretext of quick insertion in the job market and opening one’s own business; and the creation of MedioTec, as a supplementary action to the aforementioned program, where an amount would be passed on to educational institutions to cover the costs of student training at EPTNM. The target audience was aimed at the population considered “socially vulnerable” and beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família program. In both cases, it is possible to affirm that the programs had an irrelevant impact, especially as compared to the actions carried out by the PT and Lula governments.

Finally, in relation to the initiatives related to EPTNM, but no less important at the national level, the enactment of Law 13,415/2017, which instituted a reform in High School. This established a proposal for the reorganization of this education stage, in which a limit of 1,800 hours common to the curriculum content is defined (maximum 60% of the workload for a minimum total of 3,000 hours), and, later, students must opt for available training itineraries, one of which is technical and professional training. This reform in the organization and rationale for high school is still moving towards issuing greater regulations and definitions on its implementation, so it will not be further elaborated in this article. However, I consider it important to point out that this reform brings out the claim of the ruling class to form suitable workers to the current conditions of the labor market - characterized by insecurity and intensification of exploration of the workforce - in order to develop life skills in young people, especially to make “good decisions” about their life project in a world marked by instabilities and uncertainties (^{MOTTA; LEHER; GAWRYSZEWSKI, 2018}). It is a formative proposal that departs from all the historical accumulation built by the ANPEd Work and Education WG in favor of high school integrated with professional training, whose main proposition is curricular integration around the science, culture, work and technology axis, which is based on the educational principle of work.

It can be said that actions aimed at EPTNM induce, albeit briefly, a reflection on contemporary production processes. As demonstrated, there has been a significant expansion of EPTNM in the last 15 years, in which such expansion was justified to meet a supposed businessmen’ need to build stocks of more qualified workforce in order to increase the productivity potential of companies. However, although schooling at secondary and higher levels had a relative growth in the first decade of the 21st century, ^{Deitos and Lara (2016}, p. 177) consider that “contradictorily, the production process requires qualification levels per occupation that, relatively, move in disagreement with the education levels required by the economic sectors”. The data compiled by the authors referring to the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) between 2002 and 2011 revealed that the requirements for occupation by level of schooling changed little, with low and medium level of qualification (79%) predominating. The synthesis of the data presented by the authors above provides elements to conclude that there is a mismatch between the business community discourse about the “blackout of qualified labor” and the actual options for hiring and/or occupying Brazilian workers by the business community. This conclusion may explain that the greater emphasis on the provision of FIC courses from Pronatec may be related both to the raising of public funds provided by the institutions of Sistema S and to the actual demand for workforce in Brazil.

It is important to pay attention to the fact that in the current political-economic situation, of flexible accumulation under the aegis of neoliberalism, the productive structure was changed, becoming more flexible, with reduced jobs and, as a result, the precariousness of work was intensified. As shown by the research by ^{Alves (2013}) and ^{Antunes (2018}), among others, combined elements of the Fordist organization pattern and flexible accumulation, production on demand in lean companies, wages linked to productivity and the intensification of new technologies have potentiated processes of deterioration in work relationships. In this sense, the intensification of competitiveness in the international market has permanently placed the agenda of Labor Reform on the part of the business community, in order to further reduce the costs of the workforce; which leads to more loss of labor rights. The very president Jair Bolsonaro, commenting that in the face of so many rights provided to the worker, “[...] entrepreneurs hire as little as possible and pay as little as possible”, and so workers should opt for “fewer rights and more employment or all rights and unemployment” (^{BOLSONARO, 2019}), sets the tone for what would be the engine of the growth of Brazilian capitalism: the expropriation of rights and overexploitation of the workforce. ^{Fontes (2010}) understands that the current expression of expropriation of rights is part of a historical process in which new ways of extracting more value will be introduced through the capture of resources of wage origin, in order to transform them into capital.

It is not by chance that there has been a systematic investment in the propagation of reports and interviews with “experts” in the mainstream media to justify the reforms, in addition to the dissemination of materials through social networks (even appealing to facts and arguments that violate any principle of rationality) and the holding of academic events and editorial publications that have very well-defined purposes. It can be said that this is a movement that combines speeches with a character of coercive persuasion (“there will be no money to pay for the retirement of the next generations”) and consented coercion (“inevitably more deaths will occur”), in order to legitimize to workers government actions against the workers themselves (coercion achieved). To this movement, ^{Fontes (2010}, p.55) understands that:

It was about introducing a new “normality”: to segment each situation or right that became a priority target and to dwell on it exhaustively, by all media means. The international plan was always presented as a model, both for the best (the good example) and for the worst (the tragedy).

For this reason, the Labor Reform agenda, in the quest to “modernize and flexibilize” the relations between bosses and employees, often refers to examples of the countries of central capitalism that have already approved legislative changes in this regard (especially, in this case, European countries) or that no longer had broad social protection and combativeness on the part of the unions (cases of the United States, China, Japan and Asian countries in general). The promise, therefore, is that, by following the same path (in spite of disregarding historical and social contexts), Brazil would be able to leverage economic growth and resume hiring workers. Under this justification, in 2017, two laws that made up the labor agenda were approved: Law No. 13,429/2017, known as the Outsourcing Law; and law No. 13,467/2017, referred to as Labor Reform. Briefly, the former allows the universalization of outsourcing, previously restricted only to occupations considered as a means and not as the end of the activity of a certain company (for example, a teacher in relation to a school); the latter is more comprehensive and modifies several provisions provided for by the Consolidation of Labor Laws, but which can be summarized on the premise that individual or collective agreements can prevail over the content provided by law, therefore, qualification as flexible. Although it is not our aim here to examine the content of the aforementioned legislation, the fundamental thing to note is that they express the dominant class’ worldview, even though through direct representatives or disseminated as common sense by the working class, the most vulnerable one to the effects of the new “morphology of work in Brazil” (^{ANTUNES, 2018}).

The consequence of the process of deterioration of work relations in Brazil, in addition to not producing the results promised by the labor reform actions, has greatly affected young people. The PNAD/IBGE of the second quarter of 2019 found that the unemployment rate of the population between 18 and 24 years old is 25.8%, that is, more than double the 12% of the total average (IBGE, 2019), a level that has remained above 25% for at least four years.

The growing number of young people who are not in a situation of work occupation, added to those who, due to discouragement, do not even look for work and also interrupt their studies, has been classified as young people neither-nor, since they would be in a condition of indeterminacy about their own lives, since they would be simultaneously outside the education system and any guarantee of formality in the work market. For many of these young people (although also mature and elderly adults) the alternative that has been presented as an immediate option is occupations linked to services by applications. There is still no list of consistent academic research on this very recent working condition, but it is estimated that around four million people have been dedicated to services by applications. In general, companies that provide services through applications present themselves as intermediaries between consumers and suppliers through self-employed workers who freely associate with the company, accepting the conditions of digital platforms. This new stage of labor relations has been given the name of “uberization of work”, as it deepens the model of outsourcing and subcontracting, as the worker becomes a kind of “permanent nano-entrepreneur-of-himself available for work.” (^{ABÍLIO, 2017}, n/p).

Therefore, in the face of a not very promising scenario in the work world, but of expanding possibilities through schooling (although it has been demonstrated that the government does not necessarily prioritize a more robust level of training), the aim of the next section is to understand how EPTNM students base their motivations, perceptions and expectations about their possible inclusion in the work world and the professional training received through the technical course.

MOTIVATIONS, PERCEPTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS OF EPTNM STUDENTS

After outlining the profile of EPTNM in Brazil and the public policies carried out and underway in the last 20 years, as well as analyzing the determinations and contradictions posed by the political situation in the work world, in this section I will describe EPTNM students’ motivations, as well as how they are perceiving their professional training process and building future expectations, by conducting field research. Accordingly, the current section is organized in order to: I) describe methodological procedures; II) identify participants; III) report research results through focus groups.

Identification of subjects

As explained in the previous section, 115 EPTNM students were contacted, who initially answered a two-page questionnaire. The first page was structured around a questionnaire that characterized the socioeconomic and family profile. The next page contained questions about understanding the motivations, perceptions and expectations of EPTNM students about aspects related to the work world and professional training. The structure of the questionnaire is summarized in the Box below:

Box 1 Themes covered in the questionnaire and explored in the focus groups 

For the purposes of exposure in this text, socioeconomic and family characterization will be based on the questionnaires, and motivations, perceptions and educational and work expectations will be based on the contents of focus groups, since they could be further developed in this dynamic.

The specific survey carried out for this research indicated that 68 (59%) respondents identified themselves as male. Two thirds of the respondents were aged between 16 and 18, which seems to explain that 107 self-reported as single, 108 did not have children, and 105 live with relatives.

Regarding skin color/race, 50 (43.5%) respondents self-reported as White, 26 (22.6%) as Brown, and 29 (25.2%) as Black. In this case, the number of people who identify themselves as Black is much higher than the Professional Education universe measured by the School Census in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which indicates around 6% - just over 10,000 students of the total universe of 170,870 - self-reporting as such (^{INEP, 2019}). As this is not an immediate research objective, this finding will not be explored, but I do indicate the relevance of understanding the factors that may influence the result in these EPTNM schools belonging to the state and federal education network.

Regarding parental schooling, occupation and income, although such questions were answered, the process of evaluating the answers lead to the conclusion that the layout and formatting of the questionnaire did not favor the safe and reliable provision of answers by the students regarding these items, especially because it refers to people other than the respondents themselves and to questions that the public does not always feel comfortable answering, such as the family income issue. On this account, it was decided to discard the reporting of these data, even though such data, it should be noted, were not ignored at the time of the survey.

When asked to answer about their relationship with the world of work, 62 respondents replied they did not have any work experience, but 45, i.e., almost half of the research universe, had or at some point had an occupation, although, at the time of the survey, only 26 declared they were currently exercising any work activity. The occupations most cited by students were trainees (9) and equal numbers (9) of TAs and scholarship holders. This is possibly due to the characteristics of the researched educational institutions, which provide this type of academic and professional training to their students. Of those who reported experience with the work world, 19 started their activities before the age of 18, but as highlighted above, a significant portion in jobs related to their own professional training, although a small sample declared having had low-skilled occupations, such as motorcycle courier, painter and telemarketer. In this sense, this finding differs, for example, from the research by ^{Marcassa and Conde (2017}), who investigated young students, mostly from high school, in a poor social territory in Florianópolis. The researchers showed that, for their interlocutors, work was a reality for almost 70% of them, a third started working before the age of 16 and their occupations are predominantly informal or in such low-skilled jobs as car washer, assistants for general services, clerks, waiters or delivery men for bars and restaurants and telemarketers on working loads that sometimes exceed forty hours a week.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Throughout the text, it was sought to establish that EPTNM is immersed in a field of disputes that tries to attribute formative meanings to it and how this type of education is related to the educational context and the work world. This is because education, as a part of capitalist social relations, therefore, markedly contradictory, also carries with it this contradiction, because, on the one hand, the business community requires the training of the workforce to be aligned with its assumptions, which are recurrently pragmatic to a certain historical time and to a pattern of production organization, access to qualified technical education is also a demand of the working class, both in relation to postulating a salary base that allows them to have a more comfortable material subsistence and enjoying the right to education, aiming at self-development.

From what was described in the article, it appears that EPTNM has had a significant expansion since the 21st century, especially since 2007, with the resumption of investment by the federal government in the construction of teaching units and the campus of the Federal Institutes, as well as the myriad of actions and programs to raise EPTNM as an axis to sustain the maintenance of the resumption of economic development. However, the expansion of EPTNM and the very constitution of the Federal Network for Professional, Scientific and Technological Education came up against structural factors typical of Brazilian capitalism. Although the fractions of the dominant class require a more educated workforce, it would not be necessary for complex training to reach such high levels, as the pattern of work occupations is still sustained with low and medium schooling levels. Thus, concurrent with the expansion of EPTNM, driven by federal institutions in the form of integrated high school, large resources were also allocated to training in professional qualification courses promoted by private establishments, especially linked to the S System.

This whole meander regarding EPTNM occurs in a historical context of intense precariousness of work and expropriation of rights. The discursive lexicon engendered by its defenders and widely disseminated by the media is based on an imaginary that the relaxation of labor laws and reforms in the functioning of the State will promote the purge of the economic crisis, and, consequently, the resumption of jobs. Such phraseology about the world is based on the fact that the dominant social relations are expressed as ideas, because “The ideas of the ruling class are, in each epoch, the dominant ideas, that is, the class that is the dominant material force of society is, at the same time, its dominant spiritual strength” (^{MARX; ENGELS, 2007}, p. 47). Therefore, they are ideas that, instead of revealing the materiality of the world, hide them and produce inversions that seek to justify why certain measures would be necessary (for example, labor reform is seen as necessary for the resumption of jobs for the working class, but it serves to lower capitalists' labor costs).

Faced with a regressive and unfavorable situation, we sought to hear how EPTNM students express their motivations, perceptions and expectations regarding professional training and possible entry into the work world. It is argued in this text that individuals’ conscience is strongly influenced by the material relations of production and the place that individuals occupy in it. Therefore, their subjective expressions, such as choice, will, aptitude, among others, are related to their objective means of life. However, the human being as a social being capable of recreating and transforming his means of objectification, also has the ability to alter the subjectivity with which he feels and interprets life. Therefore, there is a rejection of any kind of economic determinism as a direct relation to the formation of human consciousness.

Students, through interviews, identified and some even valued the family's influence on their choices and destinies; they judged the limits and possibilities of the training processes to which they are submitted; they interpreted that the capital crisis brings them concrete difficulties for the present time and in any type of future projection, which is also part of the process of self-formation of individuals who are in a kind of rite of passage into adulthood; and, even in the midst of difficulties imposed by situations beyond their direct control, they believe that they can resort to strategies to overcome them. This brief synthesis of the results of the field research made it possible to highlight the EPTNM students' elaboration about their present and projection perspectives, which becomes somewhat challenging, considering the regressive historical situation in the world of work and education. However, if uncertainty and unpredictability are evident in the present time, the ability to recreate and transform human beings, especially the inventiveness of the youngest, offers a possibility of a turnaround for better days.