Abstract
This presentation of Brazilian engineering sketches its trajectory in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Well into the nineteenth century, engineering was unwelcome in Brazil: its agricultural slaver society had little use for it. Although the oldest engineering school in the Americas was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1792, Brazilian engineering was an unwanted novelty. It took Vargas’ 1930 dictatorship to bring about Brazilian engineering . Engineering in the Brazilian context became more than buildings and machines. It emerged as the core of institutional innovations, as a tool of a national development project. It bloomed in the late 1950s, leading to almost half a century of accelerated industrialization . A peculiarity of this contextualized process was the leading role of graduate studies over undergraduate education, and its emphasis on intervention in Brazilian reality in engineering education. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, a new political coalition seeks to redesign the institutionality of federal universities in Brazil, jeopardizing the future of Brazilian engineering and putting national engineering capability at stake.
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Notes
- 1.
A note appears the best way to annotate the synthesis presented above. The reconstruction of Brazil’s history is grounded on Gilberto Freyre (1933/2005, 1959, 1987), Celso Furtado (1959/2009) and Sergio Buarque de Hollanda (1936), with François Chevalier (1977) and Leslie Bethell (1987, 1989, 1995, 2008). The history of Brazilian engineering is far more fragmentary, with pride of place for the ongoing efforts by Pedro Carlos da Silva Telles (1993, 1994, 2009, 2010), to which Paulo Pardal (1984, 1986) adds detail, and which benefits of Schultz (2001) and Alder (2010) for the role of French inspiration. The issue of steel benefits from memories of the free-docent thesis of Maria Luiza de Carvalho Proença, Domício’s mother, towards full professorship, no copy of which survives. Silva & Proença Jr. (2013) offers a more extensive and annotated presentation on CAPES and Engineering with both documentary and critical references.
References
A note appears the best way to annotate the synthesis presented above. The reconstruction of Brazil’s history is grounded on Gilberto Freyre (1933/2005, 1959, 1987), Celso Furtado (1959/2009) and Sergio Buarque de Hollanda (1936), with François Chevalier (1977) and Leslie Bethell (1987, 1989, 1995, 2008). The history of Brazilian engineering is far more fragmentary, with pride of place for the ongoing efforts by Pedro Carlos da Silva Telles (1993, 1994, 2009, 2010), to which Paulo Pardal (1984, 1986) adds detail, and which benefits of Schultz (2001) and Alder (2010) for the role of French inspiration. The issue of steel benefits from memories of the free-docent thesis of Maria Luiza de Carvalho Proença, Domício’s mother, towards full professorship, no copy of which survives. Silva & Proença Jr. (2013) offers a more extensive and annotated presentation on CAPES and Engineering with both documentary and critical references.
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Silva, É.R., Bartholo, R., Proença, D. (2015). Engineering Brazil: National Engineering Capability at Stake. In: Christensen, S., Didier, C., Jamison, A., Meganck, M., Mitcham, C., Newberry, B. (eds) International Perspectives on Engineering Education. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16169-3_4
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