PLACING THE ISSUE

The field of Education and, more specifically, the Sociology of Education, is used to approaching the issues surrounding the relationship between Education and Society, considering the teaching institution as a point of reference, as a place from where we observe. From this perspective, we investigate the school based on its agents, its practices and traditions, rituals, approaching it in its history, its relations with other institutions. We also investigate the youngsters and children who attend it (as subjects, as institutional parties) once they are, at the same time, object and objective of the educational and school action.

In 2003, Marilia Spósito, in the article “A non-academic perspective in the sociological analysis of the school”, recognizes the huge effort and the significant accomplishments that important authors in the field¹ have been achieving since the 1950s regarding the knowledge about the school institution, its deadlocks, its parties, identifying emergences and ruptures. However, it also shows us that these studies have gaps. Therefore, in this sense, they provide, up to this day, “[…] suggestive paths capable of enriching the understanding about the school institution, especially in this moment that is characterized by a deep crisis in its socializing action.” (Spósito, 2003, p. 210, our translation).

Here, we do not intend to enter the debate about the socializing action of school and its crisis. Authors such as Dubet and Martucelli (1997), Lahire (2004), Thin (2006), and, in Brazil, Setton (2009) have been debating this matter at least since the 1990s, and Tomizaki, Silva and Carvalho-Silva (2016) has been analyzing political socialization. On the other hand, we want to assume other consequences from Spósito’s formulation.

If the relations between the forms of socialization become narrow, produce new sociability, then it is necessary to consider that the research about the school life in its non-school elements requires a denser knowledge of the subjects — in this case, adolescents and youngsters — that surpasses the limits of their lives inside the institution. This knowledge leads to the absorption of analytical and theoretical instruments of sociology in the stages of life — childhood and youth — and the relationships between generations. (Spósito, 2003, p. 222, our highlight)

To investigate the field of Education, built from the observation point of the youth, however, constitutes a specific activity. Because, for that, it is necessary to build a point of view based on these subjects.

The objective of this article is to carry out a first analysis with a new investigative approach for the field of Education, based on the construction of a point of view (Bourdieu, 2012). Therefore, in the first stage, we will build youth as a social position, however subjected to a significant variety of life conditions and ways of expression. In the second stage, we will try to demonstrate the analytical possibilities that come from such a perspective for the field of Education, through an exercise of analysis about the HS reform.

YOUTH AS A POSITION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF PIERRE BOURDIEU

In the article “Class condition and class position”, Bourdieu (2009) shows that a social position is a social location, which delimits a set of properties (not only, but also — and maybe mostly — symbolic). From this place, connections are established with the broader system of social relations, and, at the same time, the sense of private social relations is built. Being in the same “abstract”, “on paper” social position (even if these constructions are necessary for the analysis) does not mean being immerse in the same set of situations and/or social conditions, according to the author.

To advance on the topic of distinguishing class position from class condition, Bourdieu (2009) will try to differentiate what is more or less permanent in terms of what relates to the analyzed relations, and, for that, he brings about the notion of structure. So, he asks: what can the structural approach do?; and he answers: the structural approach allows to capture transhistorical and transtructural features (we would say more permanent ones), through the systematic study of a particular case, which appear with few variations in all groups with equivalent positions.

The author leads us to conclude that, as expected, a social position accumulates permanent features. However, according to him, to escape from the abstract character of the definition of a position, it is not enough to only analyze it considering the transhistorical and transtructural elements that it gathers, once (as also teaches us Lefebvre (1991), in “Everyday life in the modern world”), societies are private products of specific historical and social formations, configuring, in its originality, their own relations and contradictions. Therefore, it is necessary to face, in the design of social positions, both the “permanent” and the “contingent” elements.²

Finally, for the French author, each social position corresponds to a significant and dynamic set of situations. Therefore, we can conclude that: a set of configurations corresponds to social positions. In this perception, it is necessary to distinguish social position (social location, which delimitates a set of properties), social condition (concrete conditions that lead the experiences of each position to vary), and situation³ (specific cases that are expressions of the relations between position and conditions).

How is the notion of social position configured for us based on Bourdieu’s text? Firstly, it is important to mention that Bourdieu, in this classic text, is trying to distinguish class condition from class position. He is distinguishing, temporarily, for purposes of analysis, the abstract idea of a general class position from the effective conditions of life in the social groups that have this position, showing that they vary. He demonstrates that the conditions of existence of social groups that have similar positions in different societies vary, and he shows that different social positions may hide similar life conditions in different societies.

We think this is a very interesting exercise, because it can be practiced when we think of youth. We have worked youth as a social position, one that is common to all of those who, in the scope of an extensive (variable) and intermediate (in-between stages of social life) age group go through, in capitalist, urban and western societies, the process of emancipation from institutions of circumscription to primary socialization, with simultaneous admission in the network/group/complex of institutions that integrate secondary socialization, leading to social insertion.

In this sense, youth is a social position, one that is simultaneously dynamic, tense, transitional, since it implies withdrawal (emancipation from the network of institutions that circumscribe primary socialization) towards a future process of social re-entry (in the network of institutions that delimitate secondary socialization). For us, this is what brings youth together (this state that is, at the same time, formative, initiating, transitional, aiming at the use of a present condition that configures a possible future insertion). In this sense, youth is a position in the social space.

This common data, however, is experienced in many variables and different manners. In Brazil, not only the conditions of exercise of youth are unequal, but the common position is experienced in absolutely divergent conditions, thus submitting the youngsters to situations of transition that are also very different. Therefore, only with a precise and rigorous design of cases it is possible to catch the inequalities and distances that mark the many ways to experience this common position.

YOUTH AS A POSITION FROM KARL MANNHEIM’S PERCEPTION

If for Bourdieu (2009) it was possible to mint the idea of youth being a position in the social space, for Mannheim (1968) we observe a relationship between youth and time. The author highlights that the common position of those who were born at the same chronological time is not only given by the possibility of experiencing the same facts or having similar experiences; but especially because they can process these facts or experiences in a similar manner.

Mannheim brings the idea of common position from a same chronological time and calls interior time an internal one, that is not measurable and can only be understood subjectively, from the qualitative perspective, and not from the objective point of view (Weller, 2005; 2010).

He highlights two perspectives from Dilthey’s line of thought and makes them reference to think about sociology of generations and the matter of time:

Therefore, Mannhein emphasizes the fact that different age groups experience different interior times in the same chronological period:

Each one lives with people of their own age and people of different ages in a variety of contemporary possibilities. For each one, the same time is a different time; as follows: a time that is different and belongs to the person, who only shares it with his/her contemporaries. (Mannhein, 1968, p. 517, our translation)

For Mannhein, the internal objectives — or “intimate goals” — shared by contemporaries of the same generation are called entelechies. So, Mannheim is dedicated to the study of common matters related to the “spirit of time” (Zeitgeist) — this entelechy — of a specific time, or even its deconstruction. This “spirit of time”, on the other hand, is formed by several generations that simultaneously work and interact in the social plan (Weller, 2010).

To sum up, the central categories in the “generation problem” brought by Mannheim are the idea of qualitative apprehension of time — contemporaneity of contemporaries — and “generational entelechy”. In this sense, this “contemporaneity of contemporaries”, or that common sharing of experiences, is revealed while the processing of experience takes place when the exercise of the juvenile condition and the juvenile experience happen in the objective reality.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF GENERATIONS AND THE MATTER OF TIME

For Mannheim (1968), youth would be characterized as a position in motion in time. To formulate that question, the author operates with three different concepts; however, they are related for us to think about the sociological problem of generations — generational unit, generational connection and, finally, generational position:

Mannheim highlights the fact that belonging to a generation may not be immediately inferred from the biological structures. On the contrary, the class situation and the generational situation would present, according to Weller (2005), similar aspects due to the specific position taken by the individuals in the social plan. But this position generates a specific modality of living and thinking, of the way the members interfere in the historical process, that is: “[...] an inherent tendency to each position that can only be determined based on the position itself” (Weller, 2010, p. 211, our translation).

Mannheim then reinforces the idea that it is not enough to have been born in the same period. What would characterize a common position of those born in the same chronological period is the potentiality or possibility of living the same events and facts (Weller, 2010), or going through similar experiences — living, in the moment in which they process their entrance in society, historical configurations that are similar in the flow of history —, but, above all, of processing these facts similarly, experienced as a founding experience.

Based on this formulation, it is possible to observe that this processing is given based on the categories that configure the experience of the subjects. The experiences, however, are shaped by life conditions, and, therefore, of (conditions of) elaboration and expression, diverse and unequal. So, categories such as class, gender, race, work, territory, age group — to mention a few — would work as reality perception filters. This specific processing of experiences brings the possibility of identifying the subjects and building their subjectivity.

Aiming at analyzing the perspectives of the two aforementioned authors, we drew a synthetic chart (Chart 1) that allows us to verify both propositions based on some common parameters. For that we will mention how, in the elaborations approached here, we extracted, from each of them, a definition of position, a notion of social relations, and a set of properties limited by the social position occupied by youth.

WHAT CAN THE “YOUTH POSITION” TOOL DO?

If a social position is a social location, then it is also a place of observation. A belvedere. Let’s continue with this reasoning: a location delimitates a set of properties, especially symbolic ones (that is, properties that belong to the real world of social relations), from which relationships are established with the broader system of social relations. In our case, assuming youth as a position of observation means building a place of observation from where social relations are seen. From where institutions, for instance, are seen.

The first consequence of building youth as a position of observation of society is that this is the place from where institutions will be seen, such as school, work, family, religion and churches, groups of pairs, among others. In this record, we consider it is possible and fruitful to follow the proposal formulated by Spósito (2003) and Spósito, Souza and Silva (2018)⁵, in the sense that getting to know the school, or even the Brazilian school system, also goes through knowing the subjects attending it, beyond the school walls, surpassing the limits of their lives in the institution. We would add: to capture the senses contained in what they express about the institutions, such as school, it is necessary to know the “social place” from where they speak. Their position.

This is a new approach about the institution. The proposal is that, based on the recreation of the social location of the youngsters, it will be possible to produce another perspective, one that is able to clarify the educational phenomenon. In this sense, we will try to understand, considering the juvenile position involves a series of institutions, the relative (and, in that case, specific) importance of school in relation to the other institutions and social agents involved in the exercise of youth.⁶

The second consequence of considering youth as a social location, from the designed perspective, is that, based on this social position, this location, the sense of private social relations is built. In other words, taking the place of vision, the position of youth means reconfiguring the function, the use, and the perception in general (or of the academic field) of institutions (including school).

Finally, adopting the social location of youth as a belvedere means understanding that it is also from this place that youth build the sense of private social relations in which it is involved. Therefore, understanding it presupposes the reconstruction of this place from where the world is seen, from where the facts are interpreted, from where meanings and functions are built for the institutions.

One consequence is yet to be mentioned. If youth is a social position; and if this position refers to a state of liminality, then it is not a fixed position, let alone a stable position, once one of the characteristics of the social group that embodies that position is that it is, itself, in a transit condition.

To sum up, considering youth as a position helps us to create a perspective and a way to approach the phenomena based on the definition of the concrete position, from where the subjects we wish to analyze experience society and its time, and build, from there, their points of view. Considering youth as a position (in space and time) creates, for the researcher, a place from where we will build our research issues, a space-time place where we will put our analyses.

From this perspective, we now present a path of application, of a use for this tool in the field of studies of youth. In the following section, we will work with the question: what can (in terms of analysis) the perspective of “youth as a position” do? For that, we will use elements of the debate about the transition between school and work to locate a way to approach youth; therefore, from this perspective, we will approach the impact of the HS reform on that group of Brazilian young people who were recently included in the Brazilian public educational system, and thus derailed by the reform.

SCHOOL EXPANSION AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

First of all, it would be interesting to place, in a preliminary manner, what we will first call recent expansive cycle, delimiting it from the 1990s until the 2000s. According to Algebaile (2009), in this period, school expansion affected especially elementary school (ES), and, indirectly, HS. Based on school flow correction policies, whose goal was to adjust the available infrastructure leading to a more efficient service of the school population group, the goal was to reduce the levels of retention. In this context, the programs of “learning acceleration” were the way to measure a project that tried to create vacancies by the acceleration of processes, without, however, creating infrastructure.

It is possible to highlight some effects of such policies with this design, that are current in the country, between the second half of the 1990s until 2002: first, the flow correction policies did not change the selective character of education, as we will see ahead; the reduction in the frequency of failure, however, improved the flow of the systems, and secondarily reduced the value of failures — as observed in Pinheiro et al. (2018) —; together with the policies addressed to families and against child labor, the reduction in the number of failures also reduced school dropouts, and, therefore, as shown by Ferreira (2019), the long school dropout.⁹

Unlike what we call the first recent cycle of school expansion, this, which we call second cycle (and lasted from the second half of the first decade of the 2000s until 2016) came with the increase in the amount of resources destined to the several levels of teaching, with the increase in levels of teaching reached by the financing of some funds (Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and Improvement of Teaching — FUNDEF, in the Portuguese acronym — and Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and Improvement of Education Professionals — FUNDEB, in the Portuguese acronym),¹⁰ strongly anchored by the debate with society. The increase in investments in education also reached higher education¹¹ and technical courses with the creation of a network of federal institutes addressed to the graduation of technicians and technologists. However, it maintained to the ES level¹² the emphasis on policies of school flow correction, therefore accompanied by evaluation strategies that aimed, on the one hand, to measure, and on the other, to reduce school inequalities.

The fact is that school expansion, designed after the mid 1990s and redirected after the early 2000s, has had major effects on the schooling processes in Brazil, in all its levels and modalities. The logic of elimination of huge contingents of children and adolescents still in ES seemed to have been replaced by a more integrative one, but which incorporated school contingents after a varied degree of conditions, thus projecting varied and unequal paths of future schooling.

On the other hand, if the system expanded, it maintained the same selective logic with which it has operated over the years. Therefore, the data in the report of the Youngsters and Adults International Conference (CONFINTEA) already demonstrated, in 2008, that non-conclusion or dropouts were, and still are, the elements that generated a demand for education of youngsters and adults in the country when we talk about the young population (Brasil, 2009). The 2016 education census gave signs that updated the tendency that had been detected in the report (Brasil, 2016). According to the collected data, a considerable increase was observed in the age/grade distortion already in the 5^th year of regular ES, showing that the path of students is irregular and discontinuous in the early schooling years. On the other end, the observation of age distribution of the students who attended Education for Youngsters and Adults (EJA, in the Portuguese acronym) showed that the early years were (and are) constituted by much older students than those who attend the final years of ES, and equally older than those who attend HS in the modality. There was also a tendency that a younger population would always enter in the final stages of ES in this modality.

Therefore, if the policies of schooling expansion in Brazil undeniably have increased educational opportunities, they did so with the maintenance of the systems’ selectivity, so that the increase in opportunities corresponded to the maintenance of educational margins, that are functional to the systems; the learning acceleration programs (especially in the basic levels of schooling), night school (especially HS) and EJA (in all levels) were its most common expressions. But what are the effects of this selective expansion on the levels of schooling of young people? Was selective expansion capable of affecting the unequal distribution of educational opportunities among youngsters in Brazil?

To demonstrate the growing importance of school in the lives of youngsters from popular classes in Brazil in the past 20 years, we will look at the data referring to the evolution in the distribution of white, black and brown young people in school levels (ES, HS and higher education) in 2001, 2011 and 2015.¹³ The object was the population aged between 18 and 24 years, because this young age group, in Brazil, is neither covered by mandatory education (which, including HS, includes the population aged up to 17 years), nor has completely consolidated its entrance in the Economically Active Population (EAP).

It is important to clarify that the population aged 18 to 24 years translates an interesting indicator, because even if only 30% of them were studying in 2015, and even if, in the set of this population, 18% were working in higher education,¹⁴ it expresses the results accumulated by the changes, limits and conquests of the schooling processes in ES and higher education. For this analysis, we used the data from the 2001, 2011 and 2015 National Household Sample Survey (PNAD, in the Portuguese acronyw — IBGE, 2002; 2012; 2016).

When we look at white students, observing Graph 1, we realize that the phenomenon to be noticed is that this group of students, over the years, had some oscillation; a percentage of 10% in enrollments in ES, increasing from 34% of enrollments in HS in 2001, until the stabilization of enrollments in 25% after 2011, using the extensive access to universities, extending the participation in this school level: from 39.6%, in 2001, to 65.7%, in 2011, and 71%, in 2015, almost doubling the importance of the participation of this teaching level among white students. Therefore, there was a change in the quantity of accesses of white students, aged 18 to 24 years, to higher education, but not a change in the access pattern (in this group, the distribution was, since 2001, proportionally lower in ES, and higher in higher education).

Source: IBGE (2001; 2011; 2015

Graph 1 Distribution of the population aged 18 to 24 years by school attendance according to color and race. 

The case of black and brown students shows a very different scenario. This is because the pattern of distribution of students among the school levels changed significantly over the 14 years of this analysis. In 2001, the highest proportion of students in this group was first in HS (43.9%), then in ES (32.2%). Only 10% of the black and brown students were attending higher education in 2001. Ten years later, the scenario was very different: the percentage of enrollments is still prevalent in HS (45%), but the proportion of enrolled people in elementary and higher education is reversed. Higher education becomes the second level with the highest percentage of enrollments for black and brown students (35.8%), and ES becomes the less frequent one, with 11.8% of enrollments. 2015 shows a distribution of enrollments for this group of students in a quantitatively different pattern, but similar in quality (in terms of distribution of students per level) in relation to that found for white students. In it, we find 5.8% of black and brown students attending ES; 35.9%, HS; and the highest proportion of students (46.8%) attending higher education.

These data show us that if the expansion of the highest teaching levels affected white, black, and brown students at the same time, the process was not identical between them. If among white students the expansion of schooling was given by the increasing number of students in higher educational levels, among black and brown students this change was not only quantitative, but also qualitative. Among the latter, there was a change in the distribution patterns of youngsters in the different school levels: from a predominantly medium-elementary distribution, we reached, 14 years later, a predominantly higher-medium distribution.

HIGH SCHOOL AS A “DIVIDER LINE”

The increasing schooling took place in a scenario of maintenance of school selectivity. Ours is a very unequal school system, despite the significant advances of the past 25 years (especially in the last 15 years). The net rate of school attendance in 2016 (Brasil, 2016) was 91.4% from 6 to 10 years of age; 78% from 11 to 14 years of age; 59% from 15 to 17 years of age; and 18.4% from 18 to 24 years of age. This shows that restrictions in the access to medium and higher levels of schooling, and especially the selectivity that crosses the whole system, from elementary to higher education, going through HS, are still a significant problem.

It is always important to remember that the delimited age groups correspond to corresponding school levels, and that the net rate of schooling points to the contingent of students enrolled in the educational system, in the expected age group. Therefore, a decreasing net rate throughout the age groups corresponding to the advance in school levels indicates that the school system, while advancing, leaves a significant contingent of students along the way.

The data in the 2016 educational census (Brasil, 2016) bring signs that update the already detected tendency in the Preparatory Document for the VI CONFINTEA, of 2008. According to the data collected in the census, there was a considerable increase in the age/grade distortion in the 5^th grade of ES, showing that the path of students is irregular in the early schooling years. On the other end, the observation of age distribution of the students who attended EJA showed that the early years are constituted by much older students than those who attend the final years of ES, and equally older than those who attend HS in the modality. There is also a tendency that a younger population would always enter in the final stages of ES in the modality.

To sum up, the expansion of schooling (in the 15 first years of this millennium) increased possibilities, changed tendencies, ruptured with major inequalities in Brazilian society; but taking place in the marks of a still significantly selective educational system, it all happened by creating and incorporating margins to the systems.

In those margins are the students who had been kept inside the teaching systems exactly because the system expanded. There are men and women, youngsters, belonging to minorities and/or ethnic diversities in the country, usually living in “territorial edges”, suburbs, slums, traditional communities, rural areas, with records of a broken school history, marked by interruptions, and by the frequent or occasional combination with work. This is exactly why these young people attending HS are mostly found in night school and/or in the EJA’s modality.

As we have been showing up to here, the expansion of school in all levels, even those considered as higher education, has changed historical inequalities, thus accelerating, in the past two decades, the emergence of a way of social insertion, especially for specific groups of popular classes who found, not only exclusively at work, but in the combination of varied ways of relationship between school and work, their anchorage.

Our hypothesis is that, with this emerging configuration, a possible new regime of transition between school and work for youngsters of popular classes was announced, and HS is a divider line. On the one hand, as Madeira (2006) teaches us, by the extension of time of youth. On the other, as Guimarães (2005) has shown us for some time, by the possibility of projection of a working career, based on this level.

Why does the clear change in level happen in the passage to high school? In literature there is no attempt to explain it, only its recurrent observation. The hypothesis is that this stage in the process of school progress is usually understood as a necessary bridge to reach the highest educational levels, and therefore works as an important stimulus in the amplification of the period of exploration of possibilities, in the field of romantic relationships and personal improvement. Only after crossing that bridge it is feasible to design plans and dedicate some time to search for a better future. (Madeira, 2006, p. 141, our translation)

But as shown by Guimarães (2005), there are important specificities when it comes to the entry of youngsters in the work market in Brazil. Here, we highlight some of them:

In this scenario, young people reach transitions that are, at the same time, intense and prospective “for work”, characterizing a process of constant entry and exit of the work market, search for better conditions and more qualified jobs. This is very common among young people, both for those in low and middle classes.

This situation has some effects: unemployment among young people is three times higher than among adults. Even in periods of employment, there is more informality among poorer youngsters, among women and in the black population. It is true that the context in which schooling expands itself, and where the workplace insists on presenting itself as little permeable to young people, creates what Guimarães (2005) identified 15 years ago as a paradox: a social destiny expected by youngsters — a transition with full social insertion — confronting with the lack of opportunities for most part of new generations.

Therefore, the benefits produced by policies of expansion in HS were not exclusive for young people, the first target-audience. The product of this expansion is remarkably social and is constituted of:

Resuming the argument: in the basic education networks, the margins, which were then eliminated from school banks, are composed exactly by those who, throughout their school lives, especially the final years, combine school and work trying to overcome the “HS barrier”, aiming at instrumentalizing a possible construction of a labor career. Those who are engaged in the emerging ways of “transiting” towards adulthood without the exclusive anchorage in school (as still happens for the upper middle class, with long schooling and no interruptions, ending up in university graduation and certification aiming at entering the workplace), nor counting exclusively on family networks to enter the workplace in an unsafe, underpaid job, with no expectations for a career.

THE HIGH SCHOOL REFORM

The reform came without having been debated with society, and followed by a coup d’état that removed from power a government that had been democratically chosen, replacing it with an elitist and unpopular project of power that ended a growing process of expansion in educational possibilities, which began in the Constitution of 1988 and established some of its most important marks in the creation of the education maintenance funds (FUNDEF and FUNDEB), in the increasing educational obligatoriness and in the policies of expansion and democratization of access to universities.

As announced in the beginning of this article, much has been said about the HS reform. Ferreti and Silva (2017), Frigotto and Motta (2017), Leão (2018), Silva (2018), Ferreti (2018) and Corti (2019), among others, have been working to translate the reform by questioning its bases, purposes, and intentions.

Besides the debate placing the theme, there is some consensus among the group of authors that approach the reform. It progressively increases the daily workload in HS to 1,400 hours/year (7 hours/day), going to at least 1,000 hours/year (5 hours/day) in a five-year deadline, but there is silence about the origin of the resources that will support this expansion, leaving the question about what will happen to night HS unanswered. Besides, the reform does not include the EJA/HS, elementary education modality belonging to this teaching level.

The most analyzed aspect of the reform has been the institution of the five formative itineraries (Languages and their technologies, Mathematics and its technologies, Sciences of nature and its technologies, Applied human and social sciences, and Technical and Professional formation), and the main critics involve the appeal inserted in the government propaganda at the time, which led people to believe that the itineraries would be possibilities open for the choice of the students, when actually what happened was the circumscription and limitation of itineraries according to the choices and/or possibilities of state administrations. Even if the matter is extremely important, what matters in this paper is exactly what the reform invalidates: the situation of night HS and EJA/HS, not included in the text.

An analysis of the 2016 school census shows us the size of the population excluded from the reform debates and text: the students in night HS and those enrolled in the EJA (Brasil, 2016). 30% of the students enrolled in regular HS attend the night shift. When we add those enrolled in EJA/HS, we comprise 40% of the students in HS, in 2016.

From that perspective, therefore, the HS reform eliminates (by invisibility, silencing) exactly the most socially vulnerable ones; those who probably concentrate irregular and discontinuous school paths; those who, after the virtuous cycle of school expansions, initiated in the late 1990s and renewed and expanded after the early 2000s, were able to stay in the educational system, trying to overcome the “divider line of HS”; those who tried to combine school and work; finally, those who tried to migrate to the emerging modes of school-work transition, configured with increasing strength after the Constitution of 1988.