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

Resumen

In Brazil, public education is commonly stigmatized as precarious and insufficient, while private education is the provider of “quality education”. Therefore, through the lenses of Pecheuxtian Discourse Analysis, this article aims to examine discourses about public and private school students, based on two similar reports, but whose idea of entrance exam is opposite: in one it is a “possibility”, as it is associated with effort and hard work; in the other it is a certainty, to the point of satirizing other professions. The articles are “‘If nothing works out’: young people dress up as cleaners, mechanics, and street vendors at a school party”, published by the newspaper Extra on 06/05/2017, and the other one, published in G1, “‘It is possible!’, says public school student who was admitted into Law and Medicine”, on 10/20/2017. 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 where ideology is performed, through contradiction, inequality, and subordination, according to Althusser (1985). Thus, subject place 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, to understand that it is also possible to resist conditions that are unequal and excluding.