Who can be a university student? A discursive analysis of the imaginary representation of public and private school students

Abstract

In Brazil, public education is commonly stigmatized as precarious and insufficient, while private education is seen as the provider of “quality education”. Discursively, we are interested in how this effect of evidence manifests itself in discourses about school, naturalizing them. According to Pêcheux (1995), words change meaning based on the positions held by those who use them, and meanings are determined by the subject’s inscription in a particular Discursive Formation (DF). Then, we selected some discourses about students from public and private schools, based on two similar articles, which published the idea of passing the entrance exam in different approaches. Based on the Pecheuxtian Discourse Analysis (DA), we realized that these articles show a contrast that goes beyond the school sphere, even though this is a reflection of the first: the economic sphere. Many believe that attending university is for the few, those from private schools who have better financial conditions. In the analyses, we have shown how discourses on public and private schools identify with the knowledge of the ruling class and align themselves with the capitalist system. As an Ideological State Apparatus, the school represents the place where ideology is performed, through contradiction, inequality, and subordination, according to Althusser (1985). Thus, subject and meaning are constituted as evident as the effect of ideological interpellation, materialized from their affiliations to certain DFs, hence the need for gestures of interpretation of discourses on pre-established social places, in order to understand that it is also possible to resist conditions that are unequal and excluding.