The current investigation on the 90`s secondary technical education reform emphasizes the changes occurred in the labor field as well as the present relationship between education and labor. The common sense associates education to a propelling element of competition of countries and individuals in an aggressive intercapitalist competitivity linked to the adoption of a series of unfavorable policies towards those who live on their work capacity. The secondary technical education reform was introduced to Brazilian society in this context, that is, it was a measure that not only would help universalizing secondary education, but also would democratize the access of students from lower classes to the federal network of technical schools. We argued, firstly, the architectural capacity of the reform in contributing to democratize the access by implementing a quantitative survey with 302 students who belonged to 3 technical schools of the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro. Our first concern was subdivided into three other ones: (1) the reform, instead of democratizing the access of lower class students to the federal schools, ended up by creating distances, due to the obstacles these students had regarding the difficulties they faced in attending the technical schools; (2) the existence of private technical schools that aimed at the middle class students would indicate the interest of this middle class in secondary technical education, and (3) the re-establishment of the dual system of education in the secondary levels would be associated not to a project of democracy in educational system but to a conception of education that understands the technical education as the most adequate issue to students from lower classes. As a conclusion we will affirm that is the conception of education that the reform embodies which, far from democratizing the access of the general public to the educational system, ended up, instead, by consolidating the professional education as a natural way to students from lower classes; and that the public technical schools aren`t elite institutions as they focus on trainning their students to the jobmarket, what provides them with completely different experiences from those provided by the elite schools.