ABSTRACT
Corvalan Vazquez argues that the new ideology of technical education stems from the need to empty the content of secondary education of its elite characteristics, it being no longer desirable that a mass clientele should have access to the cultural and behavioural characteristics of the ruling class. The only exception to the Latin American rule of permitting the continuation of an academic stream was the Brazilian reform. In Brazil likewise, with the basic education cycle responsible for the discovery of vocational interests and aptitudes, and the diversified secondary school as a supplier of trained middle-level technical personnel in accordance with detected needs. In order to understand how such a radical form of diversification was possible in Brazil in the face of the same entrenched interests as in the rest of Latin America, it is necessary to look a little at the authoritarian background to the reform.
