SCHOOL DROPOUT OR EXPULSION: WHY DO STUDENT-MOTHERS LEAVE SCHOOL?

ABSTRACT

This article problematizes the judicialization effects of dropout in the lives of student-mothers cited in legal proceedings for intellectual abandonment, filed in a region in the south of Paraná, in 2018. It uses Foucauldian studies of gender and race inequality as a theoretical contribution. The data sources are the School Evasion Questionnaire and data from school transcripts and enrollments, undertaking an intersectional analysis of the social markers of race and gender. The results found indicate a course of failures and dropouts prior to motherhood and the judicialization of school dropout, hiding a long process of school failure, which resulted in expulsion. Judicial processes reinforce the displacement of biopolicies for pregnant students and those with children, producing gender and racial inequality in the school space, and highlight the fragility of public policies that guarantee, in fact, the right to education for students-mothers.

Keywords:
school dropout; gender and race relations; students-mothers

RESUMO

Este artigo problematiza os efeitos da judicialização da evasão escolar na vida de alunas-mães citadas nos processos judiciais por abandono intelectual, instaurados em uma comarca do sul do Paraná, em 2018. Utiliza como aporte teórico os estudos foucaultianos, de desigualdade de gênero e raça. As fontes de dados são o Questionário Evasão Escolar e dados dos históricos escolares e das matrículas, empreendendo uma análise interseccional dos marcadores sociais raça e gênero. Os resultados encontrados indicam um percurso de reprovações e desistências anteriores à maternidade e à judicialização da evasão escolar, escondendo um longo processo de fracasso escolar, que resultou na expulsão. Os processos judiciais reforçam os deslocamentos das biopolíticas para as alunas grávidas e com filhos/as, produzindo a desigualdade de gênero e raça no espaço escolar, e evidenciam a fragilidade das políticas públicas que garantam, de fato, o direito à educação para as alunas-mães.

Palavras-chave:
evasão escolar; relações de gênero e raça; alunas-mãe

RESUMEN

Este artículo analiza los efectos de la judicialización del absentismo escolar en la vida de las estudiantes-madres mencionados en los procesos judiciales por abandono intelectual, instituidas en una región del sur de Paraná, en 2018. Se utiliza como aporte teórico los estudios foucaultianos y de desigualdad de género y raza. Las fuentes de datos son el Cuestionario de Evasión Escolar y los datos de los registros escolares y la matrícula, realizando un análisis interseccional de los marcadores sociales raza y género. Los resultados encontrados indican una trayectoria de reprobaciones y abandonos anteriores a la maternidad y a la judicialización del absentismo escolar, escondiendo un largo proceso de fracaso escolar, que derivó en la expulsión. Las demandas refuerzan el desplazamiento de la biopolítica para estudiantes embarazadas y con hijos pequeños, produciendo desigualdad de género y raza en el espacio escolar, y evidencian la fragilidad de las políticas públicas que garantizan, de hecho, el derecho a la educación de las madres estudiantes.

Palabra clave:
absentismo escolar; relaciones de género y raza; estudiante-madre

INTRODUCTION

The provision of free public education for all children and adolescents between 4 and 17 years of age is a right guaranteed by the Federal Constitution of 1988, modified in 2009 by Constitutional Amendment n. 59, which extended compulsory education from 4 to 17 years old, a right regulated in 1996 by the National Education Basis and Guidelines Law (LDBEN). This work does not question this right, but brings suspicion about its effective guarantee, as it focuses about who is not benefiting from it. Its objective is to problematize the effects of the judicialization of school evasion in the lives of student-mothers¹ mentioned in the processes for intellectual abandonment in a region in the south of Paraná, analyzing their school trajectories and intersecting the social markers of race and gender. For that, it used as methodological tools the analysis of documents and the intersectional analysis of the social markers race and gender. Thus, we sought to verify whether there was a history of school failure before pregnancy/motherhood, and whether race is a social marker that produces this condition.

The analyzes made in this work show us how power relations operate, extend and refine themselves, classifying and determining who should or should not remain in school. We understand, as well as other works (Bento, 2011; Brito, 2006; Ratusniak, 2019; Oliveira Junior & Maio, 2016), that school dropout hides a slow process of expulsion, as we found that many students in this condition called for extrajudicial hearings they had a long history of school failure, evidenced by a trajectory of failures, dropouts, insufficient performance. Before they stopped going to school, they didn’t learn.

THE RESEARCH ROUTE

Fischer (2012) points out that research needs to be driven by doubts, materialized in creative ways of asking. Thus, from the suspicion about the statement that it is normal for pregnant students and mothers to give up studying, the question arose: how did such normalization occur? Thus, when we chose as the research locus the documents and practices that criminalize and judicialize school dropout, it was because we knew that they brought fragments and life stories that give existence to the student-mothers’ ways of life.

Supported by Foucault (2006), we understand that documents produce truths that objectify and subjectify people and that gain notoriety from their relation with power. They contain reports of fragments of people’s lives, speeches they name, report conduct practices. In this research, the documents analysis gave visibility to the biopolitics that govern the life of student-mothers, to the power relations that extend from the school to the judiciary and that produce truths about who is in a situation of school dropout. Truths that are crystallized and become common sense. Therefore, our attitude is suspicious when caring for the family is alleged as the main reason for students to stop attending school. The analysis of the documents gave us clues as to how the evasions that occurred for this reason were produced year after year in the schooling process of these students and how the social markers they carry potentiate the oppressive schemes (Collins, 2019) that produce the hidden expulsions in the evasions.

The present work analyzes the School Dropout Questionnaire, an instrument filled out in extrajudicial hearings carried out by the Project Combating School Dropout, developed in a region in the south of Brazil, and registered in the Electronic Process of the Judiciary of Paraná (PROJUDI), in the year 2018. Through this instrument, we had access to the student-mothers’ school documents, available in the State System of School Registration (SERE). It should be noted that we analyzed these documents of all 138 students summoned to the extrajudicial hearings. Access to the data was authorized by the District Judge. Another research procedure was the participation in four extrajudicial hearings and in a meeting of the School of Parents, actions developed by the aforementioned project and that allowed a better understanding of the completion of the School Dropout Questionnaire. The research is registered with the Ethics Committee of the Health Sciences Sector of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), with approval on August 17, 2018, under opinion n. 2,828,333.

In each municipality in the region surveyed, extrajudicial hearings are held upon summoning the families mentioned in the processes. In these hearings, guidance and explanations are given about the social function of the school and the role of fathers and mothers in the education of children and adolescents. In the end, the judiciary operators call family by family and request the information they fill out in the School Dropout Questionnaire. This instrument is part of a series of actions that make up the Combating School Dropout Project, developed by this region.

The School Dropout Questionnaire is filed at PROJUDI. It aims to survey the profile of families and students called to extrajudicial hearings. It is an instrument prepared by the judiciary team itself. It consists of an initial part, with personal data and the school situation. Next, there are lists with reasons that may be responsible for the evasion and that must be read to the families, who select them and which are indicated by the applicators. The document continues with items that aim to know the history of learning difficulties. Subsequently, data on family composition, enrollment in the Bolsa Família Program and income are collected. Checks for pregnancy, maternity/paternity, marriage/stable union, abuse of alcohol and/or drugs. It investigates the presence of socio-educational measures filed against male and female students. It ends with a question about the need to speak individually with the judge, who is present to assist the families.

For data analysis, information from all questionnaires was organized into fields in an Excel table. This organization allowed the quantitative survey in the form of absolute numbers and percentages. Based on this analysis, we created the family care category, which represents the reasons for evasion related to marriage/stable union, having children/daughters and pregnancy. This organization made possible the intersection of the analyzed fields, giving visibility to the ways in which the accumulation of disadvantages produced by the social markers gender and race can define the performance and trajectory producing school failure. In SERE, it was possible to complement data on self-declaration of race, being a Bolsa Família beneficiary and age. Access to this system also made it possible to collect other information, such as the presence of failures, withdrawals and approvals by the Class Council².

In this way, together with the analysis of documents, intersectionality is used as a methodological tool, as it allows locating “the experience of racism, shared with other present experiences, politically discursive, in the black women’s lives” (Akotirene, 2019, p. 50). This analysis allowed us to understand how the social markers of the students summoned to court hearings produce school dropout. Intersectionality allows us to understand how the forms of subordination produced by oppression schemes (Collins, 2019) are organized and push the researched students into the domestic space. For this analysis, we rely on black feminist studies, which warn us that “specific experiences of intersectional subordination are not adequately analyzed or addressed by traditional conceptions of gender or racial discrimination” (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 174). Thus, the intersectional analysis proposed here makes it possible to show how the student-mothers and, more frequently, the black student-mothers have their right to education doubly denied when the school does not teach them and when it naturalizes that they should stay at home taking care of their family.

BIOPOLITICS AND THE PRODUCTION OF WAYS OF LIFE FOR STUDENTS

Foucault (2008a, 2008b), in the courses Security, Territory and Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, problematized a form of power that no longer acts only on the bodies of individuals, but aims to act on the way of populations’ life. He called this form of biopower, which aims to conduct, operating biopolitics, that is, practices and discourses that act on what the population has in common: life. In this new rationality, the State starts to establish ways of living, calculated based on demographic and statistical studies. For Foucault (1988), “[...] we should speak of ‘biopolitics’ to designate what makes life and its mechanisms enter the domain of explicit calculations, and makes power-knowledge an agent of transformation of human life.” (p. 134).

In the educational context, this knowledge allows the production of power-knowledge about childhood and adolescence and the establishment of practices that act through public policies and documents that determine how they should be conducted, placing the school as a privileged space to operate such driving. In this way, laws are created that determine that it is necessary to attend school, and those who do not follow this determination become subject to punishment.

We can consider judicialization as one of the results of contemporary biopolitics, an inflation of the Law that starts to legislate on life, positioned as a privileged field in the moderation of conflicts. The multiplication of laws and penalties responds to a demand for security and prevention of the risks produced, anchored in scientific concepts that meet the rationality of the neoliberal State (Marafon, 2014). The demand for punishment of those who do not it was as expected causes the judiciary to supervise and legislate on everyday conduct.

The judicialization of education makes the biopolicies addressed to the normalization of the adolescents’ lives, keeping them in the condition of students. Even when they stop attending school, in most cases their return is determined, under threat of the initiation of proceedings for intellectual abandonment. In the case of student-mothers, the return is conditional on the health of the fetus and the care of their sons and daughters. This phenomenon also produces nominations that position female students who dropout of school as outside the norm. As it does not act in the context that produces exclusion, this mechanism ends up becoming more of a punitive practice. Thus, at the same time that judicialization brings them closer to the norm, it also distances them, because it again marks the difference.

The biopolitical practices that produce compulsory schooling emerge in the form of the right to Education, as the school is a privileged space for the subjects’ constitution aligned with a nation project. In Brazil, this right appears in the Constitution of 1824, initially guaranteed only to white men. For women, this right was only granted almost 60 years later, in 1882 (Veiga, 2008). The 1934 Constitution determined compulsory school attendance in primary education, placing it as a criterion for approval. The family became responsible for its guarantee, and evasion was a result of its omission. During this period, the need for human capital formation (Foucault, 2008b) for the developmentalism proposed by the Getúlio Vargas government made mass schooling a way of instructing the population, meeting the new work demands for the desired industrialization.

In this context, the practices of the judiciary also become part of such biopolitics, producing ways to monitor and punish those who escape the norm. One of them is the criminalization of school evasion, foreseen in intellectual abandonment, a crime created by Decree-Law n.º 2.848/1940, article 246 of the Penal Code: : Penalty - detention, from fifteen days to one month, or fine” (Brasil, 1940, p. 95).

The control practices of those who escape the norm of an educated subject are being refined and multiplied, activating more institutions and the ways capillarization of controlling school attendance. The LDBEN, for example, in its article 12, item VII, establishes a system of complaints, making it the duty of school managers to inform family members and/or guardians, the Tutelary Council, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary when absences exceed 50% of what is allowed, that is, 12.5% (Brasil, 2018). Thus, we have a fertile ground that allowed the constitution of the phenomenon of judicialization of school evasion.

Paraná, the state where the researched region is located, has a specific program to control school dropout, developed by the State Department of Education (SEED), in partnership with the Public Ministry, implemented in 2009, called the Programa Fica Comigo. It proposes actions for monitoring school attendance that are stricter than those proposed by LDBEN and the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA), expanding control and monitoring practices for adolescents. With five consecutive absences or seven alternating absences, school leaders forward the Absent Student Communication Form (Ficha Ficha) to the Tutelary Council (Paraná, 2019). An investigation is carried out, with possible notification to family members if necessary. The persistence of the evasion will trigger the Public Prosecution, which will make the complaint to the Childhood Court. This opens the process of intellectual abandonment.

The time to fill in the Ficha fica, with all the procedures until the evasion was known by the judiciary, compromised the school year. For this reason, in the region surveyed, the judge created the Combating School Evasion Project, replacing the Programa Fica Comigo and streamlining the processes. Both the Programa Fica Comigo and the Combat School Evasion Project are operators of biopolicies that govern the life of the school population, bringing those who deviate from it into the norm. They are forms of controlling the ways of living of students and their families, and which have in the judicialization “[...] a primacy of the norm over the law, in the current processes of subjectivation, based on punitive practices but without losing sight of the articulation with the law and the production of knowledge” (Lemos, Galindo, & Costa, 2014, p. 431).

In extrajudicial hearings, the conditions requested for the return of the student are made possible. If the evasion persists, the process takes place and the family can be condemned for the crime of intellectual abandonment. On the other hand, if the reason for evasion was pregnancy and/or maternity, the process was³ suspended and maternity and child protection services were activated. The teenager began to be monitored with biopolitical practices that no longer aimed at the student, but now aimed to protect motherhood. The young woman is referred for prenatal care and social programs, such as Bolsa Família. She stops being a student and becomes a mother.

In our research, we work with the idea that school dropout hides a process of expulsion of certain populations from school. We rely on other investigations that have also examined this perspective. Brito (2006), researching black students, called soft expulsion the result of insufficient academic performance, which is composed of failures and evasions that constitute school failure. Bento (2011) also uses the concept of expulsion in his research with the trans population at school, alerting to the limitation of the term evasion. In a similar perspective, Oliveira Junior and Maio (2016) problematize the compulsory expulsion of trans students that appears camouflaged in evasion and school failure. This concept is also triggered by Ratusniak (2019), who identifies a school trajectory marked by school failure of male and female students named as dropouts. This form of expulsion is the result of micro punishments that punish insufficient performance, successive disapprovals, the body that grows and stands out, skin color, body aesthetics. They are multiple practices, thin, almost imperceptible, but they happen everyday. In this sense, it is constancy that gives them so much strength. A force so great that it destroys the sense of belonging to the learning space. Judicialization, in the theme analyzed here, is also one of these practices. It does not guarantee the right to education, but only the return. With the pretext of new inclusion, it inserts these students again in an excluding environment, which continues to operate with micro punishments.

All the ritual present in the judicialization (notifications delivered by the Tutelary Council, attendance at hearings, completion of the School Evasion Questionnaire, determination of return, opening of judicial process, elaboration of defense, hearing, application and execution of the sentence) also generates the micro punishments, which produce subjectivations that, together with structural racism, discrimination by social class and insufficient school performance, create the feeling of invading a space that is not made for them.

SCHOOL DROUPOUT AND FAMILY CARE

We will now specifically discuss the situation of female students who were summoned to extrajudicial hearings and who claimed marriage/stable union, pregnancy and maternity as a reason for not going to school, which we have grouped in the family care category. The research found that, for student-mothers, there is a displacement of biopolicies that suppress the right to education and, in its place, institute rights related to the protection of motherhood, making it difficult for them to exist and stay in school. The processes for intellectual abandonment of these students reinforced this displacement, as they were suspended until they found favorable conditions to return to study.

The question that moved us was: Why, in school and judicial practices, does care for the family become an impediment for the student-mother to continue studying? To answer this question, it is necessary to problematize how this responsibility was delegated to women and how this care directly influences the constitution of good-enough motherhood and the social recognition of the good mother. Here we will trigger clues that bring some answers.

The first is found in the constitution of the monogamous heterosexual family as a social norm. In this model, men are responsible for supporting the family, while women must take care of the husband, the house and the children, aiming to raise them in a healthy way (Donzelot, 1986). The second clue lies in the development of Social Medicine, also in the 18th century, which began to relate childhood illnesses to lack of care and which also focused on the woman’s body to adapt it to the periods of life most suited to motherhood. Both the constitution of an ideal family model for raising sons and daughters, and the determination of an ideal time to have them are produced by the biopolicies addressed to women, put into operation by the device. Foucault (2014) defined this concept as “… a decidedly heterogeneous set, which comprises discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions” (p. 45).

Silvana Darré (2013) discusses how the device puts gender technologies into operation, producing subjectivities linked to motherhood. The link between maternal care and civility adds complexity to the act of educating, triggering specific knowledge that compose maternal pedagogies. The author points out that,

[…] the idea that the mother is the sole responsible for the qualities of her offspring is constantly reinforced and, by extension, also responsible for the future of humanity (if under the idea of nation, future of race, criterion of physical or mental health, of the happiness of the new generations, or of the social order in general) (p. 13).

Maternal pedagogies are produced by the knowledge of psi sciences (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry) which, aligned with other practices of the sexuality device (Foucault, 1988), naturalize motherhood as an inherent condition of every woman. These same sciences would produce explanations and corrections for inadequate motherhood (Darré, 2013).

In search of good-enough motherhood, the woman’s body became a privileged object of study in Medicine: conception, the gestation of strong and healthy children, breastfeeding, the establishment of an affectionate relationship with children, education . Women have become the main ally of physicians and social agents in promoting the health of the population. Early childhood care was essential. Psychoanalytic theories pointed to this period as the genesis of neuroses, psychoses and perversions, focusing their practices on family dynamics (Badinter, 1985).

Biopolitics that aimed to produce this norm began to regulate the woman’s body, for example, in the production of discourse about the most suitable period to be a mother: she cannot be too young (the body is not prepared) nor too old (genetic flaws). In order to regulate this body in the optimal period, an intense process of medicalization was operated (Nunes, 2013). Birth control campaigns began to be widespread, with different directions, considering social class and race. Poor, black women, in conditions of social vulnerability, were constantly harassed to undergo definitive sterilization (Brasil, 1993). Public policies that encourage the medicalization of the woman’s body, determining the conditions under which pregnancy should occur, are expressed in the actions of the Unified Health System (SUS), which only offers permanent sterilization when applicants meet specific conditions: minimum age, number of children, partner’s authorization. However, if the woman is a drug abuser, homeless, extremely poor, mentally ill or intellectually disabled, conditions change and sterilization may be compulsory. These policies are spaces through which racism and class discrimination exercise control over bodies.

Badinter (1985) researched the essentialization of European motherhood, analyzing the construction of the myth of maternal love. The philosopher will tell us that he is not universal and has not always existed. It is one more among many human feelings, composed of uncertainties, weaknesses and imperfections. She considers that motherhood as a feminine nature is deterministic and that maternal love is a phenomenon that crosses time, although it is not universal or manifests itself in the same intensity: “… The different ways of expressing maternal love range from more or less, passing for nothing, or almost nothing” (p. 23).

The social attribution of caring for the family as a women’s task and the desire to be a mother and maternal love are inherent to all explain why there is no strangeness with the dropout of students caused by caring for the family. When the student becomes pregnant, she must prioritize the pregnancy and subsequently the creation of the baby. The moral sanctions directed at her make staying at school difficult. Speculations about her moral conduct by denouncing a sex life, the trial and recrimination make it difficult to remain pregnant in school. This body reveals the exercise of sexuality outside the ideal time imposed by the biopolitics that operate the device of sexuality (Foucault, 1988). Marriage/stable union and motherhood are considered inconsequential choices.

The analysis of the school trajectory shows us that many of these students were already excluded from learning spaces even before becoming pregnant or getting married. This finding was also made by Almeida (2002) in research with pregnant teenagers or mothers: “Pregnancy appears as a reason for definitive dropping out of school when it is no longer part of the life teenagers’ project” (p. 202). The author, together with Nunes (2013) and Catharino (2018) points out that many teenagers who became pregnant chose to be mothers, anticipating the life project socially destined for women. Motherhood and starting a family, for them, became an achievable life project.

In order to understand more broadly the dropout of female students, it is necessary to intersect the social markers gender and race, because when we refer to black female students, the effects of racism weigh on them. Maria Helena Souza Patto points out how scientific racism, from 1920 onwards, consolidated as truth the hypothesis that there would be an intellectual inferiority of black people. These theories were disseminated mainly by Medicine, and had a great reach in Normal Courses, which trained teachers. The solution to the degeneration caused by miscegenation would be to whiten the population (Patto, 1999).

Later, from 1930, the myth of racial democracy aimed to “deny racial inequality between whites and blacks in Brazil as a result of racism, affirming that there is a situation of equal opportunity and treatment between these two racial groups” (Gomes, 2005, p. 57). The idea that there would be a racial democracy had (and still has) the effect of denying that there is prejudice and discrimination in Brazil, which for a long time prevented public policies from being instituted to combat racism, which sought to minimize inequalities and which redress policies such as the quota system. Only after successive demands from social movements such as the Movimento Negro Unificado do these come to be heard by the Legislature and the Executive, producing and implementing public policies such as Law 10.639/2003⁴ and the Statute of Racial Equality, Law 12.288/2010 (Brazil, 2010).

On the other hand, these laws do not translate into permanence and advancement in the schooling of the black population. Data presented by the IBGE show that school dropout is higher among the black population, indicating that black and brown people aged 18 to 24, with less than 11 years of schooling, accounted for 28.8%, against 17.4% of the population white (IBGE, 2019). Gender was not analyzed. In the Educational Data Laboratory of UFPR, it was possible to find data on race and gender in the Out of School Population indicator, with information from 2015 collected in PNAD/IBGE/2015. In that year in Brazil, the number of black female students from 4 to 17 years old out of school was 742,063. When comparing with black students, who total 898,354, we see that the difference in gender is not as great as that of race. In the white population, the number is 358,859 female students and 460,613 male students (UFPR, n.d.). In Paraná, 30,710 black students aged 4 to 17 were out of school, against 29,380 white (UFPR, n.d.). It is important to remember that in the 2010 census, 28.5% of the population of Paraná declared themselves to be black. Therefore, if we analyze these data proportionally, we will see that black students are more likely to drop out of school, just because they are black. We noticed the gear of institutional (Almeida, 2021) racism working and expelling this population from school. In this perspective, race is a structure of class, or in the words of Davis (2016, p. 50) “Race is the way class is lived”.

The number of enrollments in Elementary and Secondary Education in Paraná in 2018 is 1,852,116 students (IBGE, n.d.). The school dropout rate in the Early Years was 0.1%, in the Final Years, the percentage was 1.7% and in High School 6.5% (QEdu, n.d.). In this sense, it is important to emphasize that the withdrawal of microdata from the School Census, carried out by INEP in 2021⁵, makes it difficult to collect data about enrollment, out-of-school population, age/year distortion, race and gender in a single source. In the researched region, it was possible to collect data only from the state network, which is responsible for the Final Years and High School, with 7,236 white students and 1,441 black students enrolled (INEP, 2018). The percentage of students in a situation of evasion in the researched region, referred to the judiciary in 2018 was 1.59%, that is, 311 students. Of this total, 44% are female students, with black female students accounting for 42% of the total. It is noteworthy that 16.5% of students in the region declared themselves as black.

These students belong to a specific social class, belong to a certain race and move through peripheral social spaces. These conditions constitute schemes of oppression that make it almost impossible for them to overcome the fate created for them by biopolitics. The spaces through which they could transit and escape this fate are closed to them by the non-guarantee of learning at school, the non-offer of day care centers, exclusive responsibility for care for women, lack of opportunities masked by disinterest. The intersectional analysis carried out here shows how the social markers that these students carry increase the chances of dropping out. There is no way to measure which of them has more weight, but their accumulation is decisive for the production of school failure and their exclusion from the opportunity of social mobility through schooling.

The analysis of care for the family and crossing this category with the social marker race and the condition of school failure bring data that strongly demonstrates which are the populations expelled from school. Marriage/stable union was responsible for 33% of female students dropping out: 56% white and 44% black. The percentage of black female students in this condition with a history of failing and dropping out reaches 92%; whereas for white students, the index is 86%. Pregnancy as a reason for dropping out was mentioned by 23% of the students. All have failed or given up. Of this total, 60% are black and 40% are white. Students who have small children represent 40% of the total who claimed this condition as a reason for dropping out. All have a history of failing or dropping out. The rate of black female students with children is 80%.

The data show institutional racism, which acts by expelling these students. Before pregnancy, maternity or marriage, there is a history of non-learning that shows them that schooling is not a possible path. Silently, with each failure, each low grade, each withdrawal, each recrimination, they are expelled from school. Blamed for not being successful in an institution that historically has not been able to teach them, they are forced to modify their life project, in search of some social recognition. Forming a family can be a way to obtain this recognition. He is pointed out by Biroli (2018), who states that in the family, “despite sexism, it would be possible to experience dignity and self-love” (p. 38). The satisfaction felt in recognizing the good mother in caring for the family would mitigate the condition of non-employability that low schooling and structural racism pose to these students. Collins (2019) points out that the function of motherhood for black women becomes a possible life project. The family acquires a different meaning than in the white population, which broadens the sense of social recognition. In addition to this function, it is also a space for protection, which is denied by the State, and for claiming rights.

The numbers presented show the school trajectory of these students and also show how expulsion from school occurs and, consequently, the opportunities that schooling would bring them. We are not surprised by the silence regarding their non-return nor the guidelines given in extrajudicial hearings for them to have prenatal care, seek social services, have medical and psychological assistance for a good pregnancy and an uncomplicated delivery. These actions are also part of a government reason, which uses institutions such as schools to select who should have access to opportunities.

The indices presented express that the displacement of these students’ life project from schooling to domestic life is a result of the micro punishments that produced school failure. When we naturalize that they evade because they get pregnant and/or get married, we remove from the scene the effect of classifications, body dispositions, exclusions and referrals that direct them to the domestic space. In this sense, the lack of affirmative actions and a care network that would allow the student-mother to exist at school is transformed into a lack of interest in studying, individualizing the causes of evasion and consolidating the prioritization of motherhood to the detriment of schooling.

The naturalization of school evasion of these students outlines for them a future based on informal, voluntary work, not socially recognized or on unemployment, depriving them of the opportunity for social mobility through Education. Davis (2016) warns us that the responsibility of women with domestic tasks and care for children, people with disabilities and elderly people can and should be shared with society, thus ensuring greater conditions of equality and advancement in schooling and professional life. From this perspective, the function of care is now extended to other people in their family, their community, their employers, State agencies and civil society. In this perspective, the judicialization of school dropout of student-mothers could have the effect of guaranteeing an anti-racist education, policies and affirmative actions that guarantee their permanence in school, in fact offering their right to Education.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

School evasion hides a slow process of exclusion from learning spaces, materialized in failures, dropouts, approvals by the Class Council, racial discrimination and the moralization of pregnancy, where the pregnant body denounces the exercise of a sexuality deviated from biopolitics produced for teenagers. These forms of punishment gradually destroy the feeling of belonging to the school, producing a sense of non-place that makes dropping out a possible way out. In this sense, there is a process of expulsion produced by the school, and not an individual choice that characterized dropout.

This process is legitimized if there is no estrangement when the student-mother stops attending school. In this condition, there is a displacement of the biopolicies directed at these adolescents from the right to Education to the protection of motherhood, enhancing the figure of the mother who takes the place of the student. Under these conditions, returning to school is only possible if this care, whose responsibility falls on the adolescent, is guaranteed. When it does, she comes back.

The data problematized here show that race is a determining factor in the school trajectories of student-mothers. The analysis of school trajectories shows a history of school failure prior to pregnancy and motherhood. Evasion due to family care proportionally higher among the black population, which denounces institutional racism.

The dropout judicialization does not guarantee the existence of the student-mother. On the contrary, when it suspends judicial processes, when it does not guarantee the right to learn and when it refers the student to health and social assistance services, it naturalizes that family care is the responsibility of women alone and that schooling is only for them. a right if they find someone or some institution that shares this care. Thus, the biopolitics that produce motherhood as completeness and social recognition for caring for the family are strengthened, until there is only the mother, who perhaps, one day, will return to being a student.

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• 1
  We understand the problematization carried out in the field of Education that differentiate the terms female and male students. However, in this text, we chose to use the term student because we consider a figure produced specifically by the school, the locus of this research. This figure is produced by practices at the service of the pedagogical device that objectify and subjectify girls and adolescents and place them in the social position of students. In addition, we consider pregnant students to be mothers, since the biopolicies that address them are aimed at protecting motherhood and the child that is being generated.
• 2
  Approvals by the Class Council happen when the student has not reached the required average, but is approved by the teachers and the pedagogical team, who are summoned to this Council.
• 3
  With the presentation of the research results to the Combating School Evasion Project team, carried out in 2019, the processes for intellectual abandonment of student-mothers are no longer suspended. Therefore, the verb tense is conjugated in the past, in this part of the article.
• 4
  Law 10.639/2003 - Amends Law 9.394, of December 20, 1996, which establishes the guidelines and bases of national education, to include in the official curriculum of the Teaching Network the mandatory theme “History and Afro-Brazilian Culture “, and takes other measures.
• 5
  The microdata that would allow the identification of these indicators by race and gender are no longer available at INEP. For more information, see Technical Note n, 5/2021/ /CGCQTI/DEED, available at: https://download.inep.gov.br/microdados/nota_tecnica_5-2021_deed.pdf

• This work was carried out with the support of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - Brazil (CAPES) - Funding Code 00

• 15
  This paper was translated from Portuguese by Ana Maria Pereira Dionísio.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Jan 2024
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  20 Sept 2020
• Accepted
  26 June 2022