From the Abstract Teacher to the Concrete Teacher

The article aims to present the results of theoretical-methodological and documentary research that aimed to gather multiple determinations of what educational work has been in the Brazilian social formation. Highlighting the complementarity and difference between the theoretical notions of abstract and concrete within the framework of dialectical materialism, the article makes a case for the direction of teacher education, beyond the concept of educational work, guided by the concrete ways in which it occurs in the Brazilian social formation. The theory of surplus value presented by Marx in “The Capital” is revisited, theoretically showing how, in capitalism, educational work occurs in a contradictory and dialectical integration into the processes of labor force formation, subordinated to capitalist interests aimed at the production of surplus value. Under this theoretical orientation, it is evident that educational work composes the productive chain of the workforce necessary for the development of the processes of extraction of surplus value that occur, from the Brazilian social formation, in an intimate, contradictory and dialectical articulation with the international division of labor.