The National Policy for Continuing Education in the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS): Centrality and Valorization of the Worker

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the process of constructing continuing education within the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS). To this end, we defined our methodological approach as a literature review inherent to bibliographic and documentary research, using as a reference the final reports of the national social assistance conferences, as they express, in their deliberations, the demands for training processes. We present the historical process that culminates in the approval of the National Policy for Continuing Education in the SUAS (PNEP/SUAS). The analysis considers the centrality of work processes and professional practices developed by SUAS workers under specific conditions and work relationships. We envision that the potential of the PNEP/SUAS to confront the contradictions inherent in the capitalist order lies in the political-pedagogical perspective it presents for the construction of social relations that break with the conservative ideological-political culture of capitalist sociability. Thus, continuing education is established as a mediator in the relationship between education and capital, whose formative processes, guided by a critical social direction, inscribed in the principles of the PNEP/SUAS (National Policy for Continuing Education in the Unified Social Assistance System), contributes to the theoretical-intellectual, technical and ethical-political improvement of SUAS workers, and, consequently, to the improvement of the quality of social assistance services and benefits and to professional valorization, therefore, to the consolidation and improvement of SUAS.