To hit the front in school: an anthropological approach of conflicts in the public school in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe and to interpret practices and representations of the daily of school life in Rio de Janeiro’s public system of education, giving special attention to conflicts among teachers, students, administration, staff etc. The methodology used is qualitative, from empirical experience and fieldwork, propitiated by the bond of the author as a teacher of the state’s system of school of Rio de Janeiro since 2005, teaching the disciplines of sociology and philosophy for high school in the city of São Gonçalo (city with more than one million of inhabitants, located in the "metropolitan area” of Rio de Janeiro). In this context, "bater de frente" [hit the front] is an attitude and an idea that builds identities and allows the ethnographer to understand, focused on public schools, these processes of construction and subversion of values and alterities that claim or dispute broader social structures.