Quando trabaio é ensinação pra rude e estudo é bom pro caba consegiur emprego melhor: falas, representações e vivências da educação escolar na reforma agrária

Abstract

This paper tries to analyze and discuss the social representations about the youth and adulthood scholar education of individuals settled in the land reform, in the Santa Luzia agro village, in the town of João Câmara, state of Rio Grande do Norte. Thus, we went through a qualitative bases research, applying questionnaires, with free association tests, semi structured interviews and informal conversations with several individuals, randomly chosen, besides discussion groups, bringing together young and adult people (men and women) from the community. This process was guided by a script according to which the individuals recalled their past situation before the taking over the land, including their (fragile) contacts with school education during this time and the daily work besides their parents so as to supply the family with their earnings; they recalled the struggling process of occupation and taking over the land, and, along with that, the building of a school in the settlement; the actual challenges and dilemmas of community consolidation; and, finally, what they expect about the school education for themselves and for their children. The social representations of the settlers about school education are structured over four pillars: their experiential memory, that is, the recalling of their journey previous to school exclusion; their subjective expectations about meeting their immediate needs for school education; their expectations about territorial future, that is, their projects of accomplishable future starting from their life and work conditions managed from their state as a settler in the land reform; and their expectations of creative future, reflected in the projects about the future which are associated with the family continuation through younger generations. From these pillars we realized that the adult settlers value school education as means of material and individual progress, but not for themselves, since they represent themselves negatively as “rough” people whose learning difficulties limit them when trying to reach higher levels of education. They project in the younger generations the dreams of a better future, starting from getting a job and income, though activities out of the village. Such lack of hope about the potentialities themselves in the settlement is shown in the reports originated from their poor life and work conditions, from their fragile productivity infrastructure and the animosity itself between the leaderships of the settlers, which brings political disagreements, and mine the construction of a community development project.