THE THE MYTH OF SCHOOL FAILURE AND THE FAILURE OF AUTOMATIC PROMOTION

Abstract

This work approaches the issue of automatic promotion, liking such matter to the discussion around school failure and teachers’ work. From a historical perspective, it approaches the various dimensions which school failure has been taking on through time, analyses the challenges presented to teachers’ work after multiple attempts to find a solution to this issue, and shows that automatic promotion is a not new subject. Such subject is linked to the concern about massive retention of elementary and junior high school students. Restarting the debate around this issue in recent years, we have discussed automatic promotion as a “privileged signifier”, which was in the core of the dispute involving different actors of social life in Rio de Janeiro, when the 2nd and 3rd Cycles of Education were created in the municipal public school system in Rio de Janeiro.