Abstract

KOBBER, Cláudia Mattos. Tempo de decidir: produção da escolha profissional entre jovens do ensino médio. ETD [online]. 2008, vol.10, n.01, pp.252-253. ISSN 1676-2592.

This work analyses the choices made by Brazilian graduating high school students regarding their programs of study in higher education. It deals with a privileged moment in the process of making decisions related to professional training, as experienced by individuals living in a society that is undergoing deep transformations in all realms, including values. In approaching the decisions that they must make at this phase of their lives, young people need to articulate a life trajectory - with family, educational and social dimensions - taking into account the perceptions they develop about different professions, as well as training opportunities and the labor market and its requirements. The sample of collected testimonies was designed to include students enrolled in a public technical school and in a high-standard private school, both renowned as good quality educational institutions. Half of the students in each group, both of which had a balanced gender ratio, were also attending preparatory courses for university entrance tests. In the public school group, there was also a balance between such subgroups as working/non-working students and those receiving/not receiving technical education in courses taken in parallel to their high school education. Thirty-three semi-structured interviews were conducted. The framework for the analysis of results was derived from the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, specially the notions of habitus and configuration. One important result is that the idea, that having a tertiary education qualification is necessary for entering the labor market, is so deeply imbued in the young people interviewed that all of them intend to pursue higher level education. Their career choices tend to be in continuity with family trajectories, hoping either to maintain their social status or to surpass that attained by the previous generation. As young people pursue this hope and enter into a process of growing rationalization, they are drawn to search actively for a balance among their personal preferences (themselves developed mainly in the family and/or school milieu), opportunities to be found in the labor market, concrete chances of entering a desired career, and the realization of an individual life project. This is made possible by means of developing dispositions such as self-control, selfdiscipline, and the ability to postpone transitory satisfaction in favor of accomplishing a project for the future. The school has a central role in the concrete shaping of this project.

Keywords : High School Education; Youth; Professional Choices; Careers; Habitus.

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