State, workers, and educational public policies: Basic education in the state of Pará and the contradictions of quality
RIAEE – Revista Ibero-Americana de Estudos em Educação, Araraquara, v. 18, n. 00, e023016, 2023. e-ISSN: 1982-5587
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21723/riaee.v18i00.17824 8
as those of rivers, as well as the territories of small, medium and large cities, with their
peripheries, of peasant worlds, of riverside communities, extractivist, quilombolas, indigenous,
fishermen, rural farmers, which result in different rural and urban youth, as well as from ethnic-
racial and gender criteria, among other factors within class relations, inferring, from these
elements, that these youths in Pará, when considering, for example, categories such as labor
market, education, and ethnic-racial relations, tend to have their lives mutilated in rights
(FRIGOTTO (2004), as pointed out by Alves and Araujo (2017, p. 162-163, our translation):
Considering the idea of the insertion of the youth of Pará into the job market
in a qualified way, data from the IBGE reveals that it happens in a precarious,
precocious, and unqualified way. It is observed that 43% of the young people
who are out of school assume, as their only perspective, that insertion in the
job market is necessary for survival.
It also reveals that only 18% of young people between 18 and 24 study, and
56% develop some paid activity. The situation tends to get worse when we
consider the youth from Pará under an ethnic-racial clipping: generally, the
data informs that the qualification and schooling conditions of young blacks
deepen this precarious condition.
Faced with a picture like the one highlighted by Alves and Araujo (2017), for example,
we problematize the inability of only the evaluative perspective propounded by IDEB indicators
to be able to define the quality of working class education, provoking more processes of ranking
and disqualification of public schools, since it is centered on a standardization of evaluation
practices that disregard the diversity of subjects, their social conditions, social inequalities,
focusing on pretentiously educational issues, but that maintain the relations of exclusion of
young people, not attacking the structures of oppression, as Alves and Soares (2013, p. 190, our
emphasis, our translation), for which "[...] schools must be seen by the learning of their students
- the expression of the effectiveness of their social function -, but also by the contextual
conditions for obtaining these results", since, the researchers also highlight, "An educational
system can only be said to have quality if its inequalities are also considered in the analysis of
its performance", so that "[...] the quality of the school in a single number does not contemplate
the unequal conditions among educational establishments".
It is necessary, therefore, to combat the social inequalities to which the youth of the
Amazon are subjected, considering Pará, which implies, according to Frigotto (2004), opposing
the capitalist mode of production that is dependent on the Brazilian context, disguising these
inequalities, when defending for the youth the thesis of employability and early insertion in the
labor market, as a condition for improving the quality of life, without opposing the structuring
issues of the oppression of Brazilian society.