Education for (becoming) Adultxs? The “school test” as transition in a Popular Baccalaureate of the AMBA

Abstract

This article presents partial advances of an ongoing doctoral research about the school experience of young people living in poverty, in popular education spaces in the field of Adult Education. In the context of implementation of compulsory middle education in Argentina, the question is raised about the relationship of young students of a Popular Baccalaureate (PB) with schooling after previous experiences of expulsion in traditional schools, with the purpose of understanding how they live the overcoming of the “school test” in relation to its processes of individuation and subjectification, in their transition to adulthood. From biographical stories emerged from interviews conducted in 2017 with two young female students of a BP of the Metropolitan Area of ​​Buenos Aires (AMBA), it analyzes the place assigned to school in their life stories and, in particular, to their experience in the PB. It is found that both associate the completion of secondary school with the conquest of independence, although they give them very different meanings, which could be related to the differences in their family stories and in their school trajectories, and have an impact in their action horizons.