Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In its medullar aspect, this article tries to collect and interpret the main representations of the working world and the labor-educational project involving social adultyoung people that are currently coursing their secondary schooling in the educational system for adults. In this text, we seek to offer empiric antecedents of a juvenile social segment that —having left the formal education, after a couple of years— is trying to finish its secondary education in an alternative system, in search for better opportunities of social insertion. The present article synthesizes some conclusive hypotheses referring to the general profile of these young individuals, their educational and work experience, the global representations of their environment and the projections referring to their own future. In general, we point out that these young persons express a new form of moratorium, in addition to be carriers of a new educational project, not without some displacement in their expectations. These are young people lacking of significant social networks, participating in a pattern of precarious formation, with low innovative levels in their discourse. Nevertheless, it prevails in them an optimistic vision of the future and a sense of trust in their own effort to make it through. Such considerations seem to be relevant in a broad discussion about the future of the educational system for adult people, in perspective of favorable formative proposals that can be adequate in order to face the transformations of the working world, diversifying an extremely rigid pattern of pro-university academic formation that is little functional to the profile of the young individual that is the main subject of this study.

It is certainly complicated to simultaneously analyse all the edges in Chilean Education in the last fifteen years. There already exists great backgrounds. The most recent report of the OCDE (2004), is of great depth and fine suggestions; and the report of Cox (2004) is very complete in background, but maybe, in our opinion, vouched for by the data of both reports and the results of our investigations already published (Redondo et al., 2004), in our opinion, seem quite self-satisfied with the politics they carried out and their effects. It is convenient to read both reports simultaneously. Although, maybe it convenient to start with the excellent article of Espinoza (2003): «Alternative perspectives in relation to the educational-state, reformed education and political education: a critical vision». The intention of this article is to neither summarize nor comment on any of the above-mentioned reports; but simply to give another opinion, trying to support it with available evidences. It is certain that the effort carried out in the past decade as regards to Education in Chile is exceptionally significant, beyond the results. But we want to enter into a profound analysis, or into depth (subversive), under what is seen; of ideological content, ethic and political; with more than econometric evidence.

The experience of sexuality in entertainment in the youth culture is a phenomenon which has not been very well considered within time to build preventive politics directed to the youth-world in Chile. In their very same scenario of the youth culture, associated with their leisure-time, where the urbanized youth pracitice and develop different experiences of approach to the sexuality articulating particular codes: building intimacy groups, together with time and space, and the approach and aproximation between each other in a festive space. The current article is based on the main results of ethografic investigation by the investigator in the context of «The study of the characteristics of risk and vulnerability of Aids in youth», developed on a national level and considered as an example integrated by youths of middle to lower classes sectors of the cities of Arica, Valparaiso, Santiago and Concepcion.

This academic work seeks to tackle a discussion in progress about youth; consumption and space, starting by systemize some ideas about the linking between the transformation of the commercial offer and juvenile culture, and move forward in the analysis of their effects on the socio-economic local environments. In the context of the dynamics that define the reorganization of the metropolitan scenario in Buenos Aires, the larger recreational centers and malls deserve a special treatment since they have set themselves up as urban nodes that internalize resources that allow young people to classify themselves and classify the rest, as well as to produce a complete redefinition —locally characterized— of the consumption of these spaces and their merchandise. Architectonic design, music, decor, functional integration, special events, advertising incitation, ads, display of products, different aspects converging to give shape to the commercial atmosphere that we can find on the inside of these large commercial and recreational surfaces, where we can breathe the phenomenon of consumerism. An economical dynamic that acquires a complexity because of an active attitude on the part of young people who recreate the space they are submerged in, trough their social practices inside these spaces, generating a huge impact on the socioeconomic local systems.

In this text we discuss about the notions of adolescence and youth, as well as the disciplinary approach to the aforementioned concepts at the present time, where it’s no longer a newness —but a necessity— to pluralize: the need to talk and conceive different «adolescences» and «youths», in a wide range of heterogeneities that we can find and visualize among adolescents and young people. This takes validity and makes sense at the moment we conceive the categories of adolescence and youth as a socio-historic, cultural and relational construction in contemporary societies, where the efforts in social research in general, and the studies on youth in particular, have been centered in letting know the stage between the childhood and the adulthood, that —at their own time— are also categories originated by social significations and constructions in historic contexts and defined societies, within a process of constant changes and new significations. We highlight the advances in the field of research in matters of adolescence and youth nowadays and set forth certain questions about the transition from adolescence/youth to the adult age, in order to help define the dimensions and variables that can provide more clarity to the analysis and their eventual impacts in the design and setting out of policies oriented to social individuals.

«Labour paths, unemployment and citizenship: in the case of Viña del Mar», presents some facets of the transition of the work market in its different levels, ideological and psycho-social targets, globally and locally. The authors explore from the angle regarding the changes in the work society, labor paths and new conditions of work in Chile to approach the particular situation of Viña del Mar, describing the main social and economical characteristics using an example of unemployed people of the city, in order to study their labour paths and their perception of employment and the citizenship. The final comments present a code of order regarding the phenomenon and explores around the psycho-social effects which are associated with the characteristics of unemployement experiences in the new neo-liberalistic times, which could be influenced by the historical-cultural mould of locality.

El Charme is a popular urban cultural manifestation developed specifically from Rio de Janeiro. The dances are carried out in diverse neighbourhoods and are performed, mostly by adults. It works itself with the hypothesis that these spaces of dissemination and sociability are also performed by youth. Besides being performed in many other events, youth are observed, wether in groups or alone. The conversations performed by some of them, act as an objective to understand by which way they choose the dance as a space to construct their identities, from the relations established with their peers. It is understood that the dances are also inter-generational spaces and are important because we can perceive the way in which relationships between youths and adults are formed. Finally, it is the contributions of the presence of youth, and their cultural expressions which are identified and they contribute to the continuity of El Charme, beyond possible transformations which this presence can produce, and with that, again signifies a cultural movement.

Similar to the idealistic representations of the youth condition, the predominant analysis on youth unemployment and the way in which it can be solved, considerates the phenomenon of isolation in a descriptive way, without repairing capitalistic contradictions and its influence on the institutional and political-judicial relations that govern the new forms of organizations and international divisions of work. Nevertheless, it is the context of labor unemployment, with its multiple relations and contradictions, and the way as it is affected by the reconstruction of capitalism on a world-wide scale. In order to make it these questions evident and to reveal its dynamics, it is necessary to put the politics of juvenile work within the the frame of the world transtition of Capitalism in Latin America under the fordistic supremacy in the social organization of work, with its respective state of being, corresponding to its post-fordistic capitalism and its state form, momentarily differentiated by conditions of the accumulation of capital and specific mechanisms of the regulation of antagonism of classes.