Crianças e adolescentes do lixão de Jardim Gramacho: razões de um fracasso anunciado

Abstract

The motivation of this research seeks to investigate and understand the reasons for school failure among children and adolescents in Jardim Gramacho, a neighborhood in the municipality of Duque de Caxias/RJ, which once housed the largest landfill in Latin America. As a social educator there for six years, the widespread school failure of the population motivated me to get involved in this work. Our objective was to analyze how children and adolescents develop a precarious habitus - which acts as fragile dispositions for discipline, selfcontrol, prospective vision, concentration and abstraction - in their socialization contexts, especially family socialization, and how this precarious habitus impacts their schooling processes. For this desideratum, we base ourselves mainly on Jessé Souza's (2018b) class theory and Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's (2014) theory of the education system, starting from the premise that school inequality reflects the structure of unequal class relations, accentuated in countries with peripheral and former slave capitalism, such as Brazil. Given this theoretical framework, we conducted an empirical research based on the methodological device "Sociological Portraits" by Bernard Lahire (2004), in which we investigated two children and three adolescents from the garbage dump of Jardim Gramacho, through successive interviews with the mothers and observations/interactions with the research subjects in the school routine and in the meetings of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Colheita. We found an extremely disqualified social position of those surveyed, arising from their class origin of the "structural rabble" (SOUZA, 2018a), manifested by a disorganized and disruptive family life, with socializing experiences of little disciplinary rigor, prospecting, and development of abstract thought, which relegates children and adolescents to an announced failure at school, where there is a hidden assumption that students enter school with a primary habitus (SOUZA, 2018b). Thus, the education system implicitly establishes a cultural arbitrariness (BOURDIEU and PASSERON, 2014) and an institutional bad faith (FREITAS, 2018) that act as a soft, smooth, and cunning exclusion of subjects coming from the "rabble" (BOURDIEU and CHAMPAGNE, 2012; FREITAS, 2018). We also verify that the picture of school failure in Brazil is accentuated, because the school institution when faced with students from the "rabble" becomes chronically fallible in a posture of the type: "there is nothing to do", especially with the structural precariousness of schools and teaching work in the country. With "Sociological Portraits" we were able to discuss this failure announced in the daily life of the research subjects, that is, within their family life and in the classroom. Finally, the empirical material of this work, as well as its theoretical basis, led us to reflect preliminarily about the possibilities of the improbable, that is, to prospect a possible social change for the children and adolescents of Jardim Gramacho's garbage dump, who come from the "structural rabble".