Do fracasso escolar à distorção idade-série: caminhos percorridos pelas classes de aceleração do Projeto Acelerar para Vencer

Abstract

This study is based on observations performed in accelerated classes of the Project Acelerar para Vencer (PAV -2009/2012), implemented in our reality by the Department of Education of Minas Gerais State. It focuses on school failure and age-grade gap, and seeks expand our understanding about the relation between school and individual expectations, leading us to think beyond the right to education. Among the reflections we highlight: inequality of opportunity, power relations inside a system that, based on hegemony, maintains a stable appearance, but has destabilized lives by denying basic rights to underprivileged social groups: access to literacy at the right age, reading, school knowledge, an attractive and good education, which correspond to the subjects necessities, according to the realities where they are inserted. Sure such problems permeate political, economical and social questions, we intend to stick to the differences inside school environment, which has led us to try to discover not only repeat, but understand the causes of age-grade gap and its insertion, or disguise, in the process of universal education, trying to understand how school and its agents perceive differences and deal with them. We applied for qualitative and ethnographic research, and seek for information in authors who discuss school failure, age-grade gap, curriculum theory, mechanisms of social exclusion, and respect to cultural differences. We conclude that understanding school social features implies enlist or do coexist, in the same way of observation, interdependent elements: politics, school, social and cultural demands. We recognize those elements are essential to think subjects and their distinctions, culture and its representation, power and hegemony in all instances of school life, moving through a two-way street which involves the enunciation of differences and its actors: the Department of Education, school management, teachers, students and their guardians.