"Life project" and meritocracy: perspectives of high school students in public and private schools

Abstract

This article analyzes high school students’ understandings of the meritocratic logic that, regardless of social conditions, attributes success in life exclusively to individual effort. Data were collected in two schools in the Vale do Itajaí (SC), one public and one private, through questionnaires and focus groups with first-year students. The results show that the idea of merit, while sustaining expectations of social mobility, contributes to the naturalization of inequalities and to what we call meritocratic fatalism by assigning responsibility for success or failure solely to the individual. The analysis, grounded in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2016), Paulo Freire (2021a), and Michael Sandel (2023), highlights how such perceptions reflect tensions between possibilities for critical education and the dissemination of neoliberal values. These student discourses emerge within a study on the curricular component Projeto de Vida (Life Project), implemented by the 2017 high school reform, which provides the context for the expression of their views. The study concludes that students’ perceptions reveal contradictions that challenge the development of educational practices committed to emancipation and to formative processes capable of problematizing social asymmetries and the limits of meritocratic discourse.