Agricultural Family Schools Contribution of the Pedagogy of Alternation in the formation of critical young people

Abstract

This article aims to show how Agricultural Family Schools seek, based on the Pedagogy of Alternation, to contribute to the formation of critical young people capable of embracing the social struggles of their time. It focused on the experiences of graduates of a school in Bahia countryside from 1988 to 1990. These young people were part of a period of struggles for the re-democratisation of the country and an intense process of articulation and political mobilisation in the countryside and the City. The qualitative research argued the conception of organised civil society, its relation with the Social Movements and Rural Education in the dialogue with Caldart, Coutinho e Pistrak. The data triangulation technique was used with questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and conventional letters with graduates in different parts of Brazil, such as Bahia, São Paulo and Pernambuco. It was found that the researched school printed, in the training process of the graduates, the characteristics expected by the PA, such as social criticism, humanist training, professional training and community leadership profile. Such training characteristics, however, were not enough to transform the structuring conditions of their working-class lives in the countryside, nor to prevent many of these egresses from moving to the cities.