Imaginando otros futuros: niños y escuelas en contextos de pobreza en la Argentina de los noventa

Resumo

The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between education and poverty in the Argentina of the nineties from the standpoint of a research framework that recognizes the qualitative changes that occurred in the country when new boundaries of exclusion were established. Understanding how these processes of deep impoverishment pervade education has required focusing on the subjects that pass through and inhabit the school in these contexts of deep poverty, and in particular on the children. For that an ethnographic study was carried out at a school located in a shantytown (called "villa de emergencia" in Argentina) during which fragments of the subjects histories of life were collected and analyzed. The study allows us to question, to learn and to understand how the survival strategies adopted routinely by these children interact with meanings they assign to the school, contrasting in the present the possibility of other futures. The testimonies and their analysis enable us to think about these children/adolescents and youngsters - labeled as poor, outcasts and excluded - from a different perspective, seeing them as subjects with the ability to "change the picture" and position themselves as makers of other realities. Adopting this viewpoint it is possible to argue that the new boundaries of exclusion have not trapped the possibilities to educate. On the contrary, recognizing the role assigned to the school by the children studied here have allowed us to explicate the constitution of different subjectivities and identities not necessarily embedded in submissive relationships established hegemonically.