Youth as a viewpoint of social phenomena and the reform of high school — what do you see when you look from another place?

Abstract

This article seeks to design a new investigative approach in education field of studies, starting from the youth, building it as a “place of observation” of the high school reform. In it, we will, at first, deal with youth as a social position, subject to a variety of living conditions and modes of expression. In a second movement, we will try to demonstrate the analytical possibilities opened up by such an approach to the field of education, based on transition studies and through an analysis exercise on high school and its reform. The results point, firstly, to a definition of youth in which space (place, in Bourdieu’s perspective) and time (flow of history, in Mannheim’s formulation) synthesize the location of this social group (young people). Secondly, by taking high school as a dividing line between different modes of school-work transition, we will demonstrate the impact of the reform on those it casts in the shadows: young people recently included in this level of education.