WHY GO TO SCHOOL? WHAT MAKES SCHOOL MEANINGFUL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE PARAENSE AMAZON

Abstract

This article presents a literature review on the meanings young people attribute to school in the context of the Paraense Amazon. Drawing on a systematic bibliographic survey conducted in the SciELO Brasil database, which retrieved 21 articles organized into three thematic axes: national perspective, theory of the relation to knowledge, and Amazonian focus, we offer a critical discussion of why young people go to school or drop out, what school means to them, and how the regional conditions of the Paraense Amazon intensify or singularize the crisis of school meaning identified in the literature. Grounded in Bernard Charlot's Theory of the Relation to Knowledge and Juarez Dayrell's sociology of youth, we argue that the meaning of school is neither purely subjective nor exclusively institutional: it is constructed at the intersection of young people's life histories, their families' socioeconomic conditions, the quality of school relationships, and the future prospects that the Amazonian territory, marked by acute sociospatial inequalities, allows or forecloses. We conclude that school is meaningful for young people in Pará, but this meaning is ambivalent, fractured, and persistently threatened by an educational structure that has yet to learn how to engage with the specificity of Amazonian youth.