A Psychosocial Approach to Exclusion from School

Brazil has made some improvements in the field of education, such as expansion of the number of schools, increasing the number of students, and decreasing the number who have to repeat an academic year. It does not mean, however, that the educational system is free of concerns. On the contrary, there are many children and adolescents who continue to fail in Brazilian schools. It might be seen through the numbers still repeating one or more school years and abandonment or self-exclusion rates provided by governmental research organs.1 The school census of 2000, which refers to the 1999 academic year, shows that the national repetition rate in Compulsory Education2 is 3.6%. This means that around 1.3 million pupils are considered not to have achieved the average level of learning. That is, they are objectively told that they have not shown sufficient engagement and learning results. Besides that, another 1.7 million (4.8%) avoid facing such judgment directly by abandoning school before finishing the academic year.

These data are important not only by themselves, but also for what they represent within the whole system. The census also points out that only 76.5% of Compulsory Education students are aged up to 14, which means that at least 23.5 % are not of the ideal age. This proportion might be higher, as the official data do not show how many out of these 76.5% have not been enrolled in the year considered to be ideal for their age.

However, these national data hide important peculiarities, both regional and local, and the differences between the two levels of Compulsory Education. Some of the Brazilian data also demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between poverty and school performance. In general, poorer regions tend to show lower levels of school success and vice versa. For instance, the poorest regions (North, Northeast, and Center-West) have, on average, 34.5% more students out of the ideal age than the ric