On the ways to exclude: permanence of school selectivity in integrated secondary education

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the school selectivity in the integrated secondary education. In order to understand this process, we conducted interviews with students of the last year of the integrated secondary education courses of a Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology (Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia) located in an area of urban periphery (Brazil). Considering that a significant part of the beginners gives up during his/her path, the analysis focused in the cases of permanence and success among the students of the course. It was of our interest to know the dispositions and motivations mentioned by the students who remain in the institution. For this, mobilizing contributions from the Sociology of Education, we could verify three aspects strongly related to the students’ success: (1) the formation of the habitus linked to the cultural capital of the social origin (BOURDIEU, 1998); (2) the learning of the students’ work (PERRENOUD, 1995); (3) the professional education course as a strategy for access to higher education. In the proposed analysis, we also sought to explain the selective and excluding character that characterizes the history of schooling in Brazil, arguing that, in the process of establishing and expanding access to school in the country, what was socially established as “natural” was the exclusion, despite of the policies and discourses in defense of the right of education for all.