School children in the XXI century: Thinking about a postmodern childhood

Abstract

This article presents part of researches that we have carried out into the connections between school and contemporary culture. We have attempted to show, interpret, and problematize ways of being poor children in public schools located in the outskirts of a Brazilian capital. This study is inscribed in an intelligibility matrix that both considers childhood as a cultural, social, historical construction that is subject to changes, and regards contemporaneity as marked by conditions intertwined in what has been widely known as post-modern culture. We have considered that this culture state, with incisive implications of media and consumption, has produced peculiar kinds of child subjects, in accordance with cultural configurations of the contemporary world. Visibility, ephemerality, ambivalence, disposability, and superficiality are part of those children's lives. These children have relentlessly sought fruition and pleasure; they have tried to participate in the globally acknowledged culture. They become who they are by living under the post-modern condition.