Youth and poverty: education and public policies under World Bank ideas in the context of increasing social inequalities

Abstract

The article presents part of the results of a bibliographic and documentary research that focused on the guidelines issued by Multilateral Organisms, mainly by the World Bank, to the construction of public policies of combating or alleviating poverty and their targeting focused on the diferent poor people, specially to youth. The research aimed to identify the main components of the public policies formulation process and their relation to the conceptual definitions in the documents that guide them, as well as to which interests they aim to respond. It identifies that education takes center stage in the totality of social policies subjugated to the idea of poverty alleviation and in youth policies as palliative solutions to social inequalities and poverty, specially among young people, in the context of chronic unemployment, typical of the current phase of the capitalism development. It identifies that the World Bank guidelines are taken by governments of different political perspectives, but aligned with capital, and that these guidelines cause changes on the social policies, turn them into focused and compensatory, and it demonstrates the articulation in this process with conceptual changes made to obscure social reality, resulting in policies which segregate youth.