Abstract

CAETANO, Pedro. To improve the world, the school and the self: the crisscrossing paths of youth experience. ETD [online]. 2018, vol.20, n.2, pp.413-433. ISSN 1676-2592.  https://doi.org/10.20396/etd.v20i2.8650671.

The problem of political apathy, especially among the younger ones, is a serious threat to the quality of democracy. The school, as a socializing forum, it is asked to work on the critical competences of the young, as well as their capacities to increase their judgements in generalization, helping them to read the world. However, the problem of apathy among young people extends to the activities in school context. The problem arises on both a macro and micro scale. In order to explore the reasons for this apathy, we intend in this article to give an account of the tasks that education can be called to play in order to improve democracy. In this sense, through the use of empirical research material collected in three secondary schools in Lisbon, mainly through semistructured interviews and observation of activities promoted by the students themselves, the results suggest a plurality of engagements and relations with politics, corresponding to a diversity of tasks that the school can play in the political formation of young people. Thus, in parallel with classical political socialization, we find the engagement by individuation, characterized essentially by participation in the life of the school and by the will of experimentation, and the engagement by subjectivation, as a problematization of politics centered on young’s own self-improvement. These engagements, which can be combined together, represent different forms of being as moral frameworks of evaluation and action. They account for a broader domain of politics as an experience of relationship with the world.

Keywords : Politics; Education; Young; High School; Great Lisbon; Engagement Processes.

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