SENAC and commercial workers training in São Paulo

the experience of ‘Universidade do Ar’ (1947-1961)

Abstract

The article analyzes an experience a distance commercial teaching experience, by radio, developed by Senac de São Paulo from 1947 to 1961. It is about the University do Ar and its Radio commercial Course. The approach taken in the article is inspired by the history of educational institutions to examine an object located at the interface of the history of radio, distance education and professional education. As a historical research, the objective was to visit the past with questions from the present and bring to light an experience of mass professional education, via commercial education. The article results from documentary research in primary sources. Documents from the Institutional Memory collection of Senac/SP constituted sources of the research. Among the empirical findings are practices of educational use of radio at a time of its popularization when the trend was its use as entertainment. The results also indicate that in Unar’s experience almost everything was adapted or reinvented: the use of the as a classroom, the theatricalization of radiophonized classes, the receiving nuclei as social integration centers in the community, the conjugation of radio with correspondence, among others. The conclusions place this experience as a symbiosis between school and radio, made possible in the environment of a society in the process of industrialization, urbanization and massification, with expansion of commerce and consequent demand for the professional (re)training of commerce workers.