Juventude, educação e trabalho: juvenilização do CEEBJA de Chopinzinho-PR

Abstract

The study was developed in the scope of the Graduate Program in Education of the Western Paraná State University (UNIOESTE), in Francisco Beltrão, in the Society, Knowledge, and Education line of research, having as its central theme the young students of the Education of Young People and Adults (EJA), given that research since the 1990’s has pointed out that there is an increasing number of young students in this type of education, raising questions and analysis and leading to what is called the juvenilization in the EJA. In this sense, our central question is: What are the possible causes that lead the working-class youths to stop studying at regular school and then start at EJA? Our general objective is to analyze the increased presence of young people in EJA in the city of Chopinzinho, Paraná state, and its relationship with educational and social inequality processes. We structured our study to analyze the working class youth and its educational processes related to the world of work from dialectical-historical materialism. That is the method capable of leading us to understand how juvenilization occurs in the EJA, in the social reality of Chopinzinho. As a qualitative study, the thesis is divided into three chapters. With them, we seek to achieve our objectives. The first chapter takes as a conceptual ground the categories of Youth, Education, and Work and the relations set within the framework of the contradictions inherent to the capitalist system. The second chapter describes the history of the structural political and social aspects of EJA, in Brazil, with the timeframe of the 1960’s to the present day. Bearing in mind these theoretical frameworks, we proceeded to field research, described in chapter three, where we present some historical, social, and economic elements of Chopinzinho, to analyze the educational data of the city and relate them to the State Center of Juvenilization in Education of Young People and Adults (CEEBJA) and the concrete data collected from the numbers of enrollments in recent years demonstrating the juvenilization in EJA of Chopinzinho. We then reflect on and analyze the answers to questionnaires applied to young students between the ages of 18 and 29 who attended CEEBJA’s high school. These questionnaires show some of the factors that led the students to stop studying at regular school and start at EJA, with emphasis on social issues related to the world of work and family.