Trends in the schooling of São Paulo elites in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to problematize questions about the attendance in basic education of four generations of the elite of São Paulo in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the analysis of data collected in research Pensamento e Práticas de Cultura da Elite Paulistana1. Based on a questionnaire and interviews carried out between 2018 and 2019, the intention is to analyze the reasons for the choice and the representations about schools. The main hypothesis is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory of groups, among others, and its subjective and objective ways of building the dispositions of a habitus. To develop the argument, we will make a relational exercise between types of institutions frequented by the researched subjects and their children, remembering the categories of frameworks, time, modalities and cultural dispositions that emerge from them. Through aspects such as the image of establishments on institutional sites, date of foundation, pedagogical objectives, affiliations with international and religious projects, we have observed elements of such processes more closely. As a result, we can say that in addition to the existence of a close correspondence between school selections and family projects, always according to the time of belonging to the elites and sectors of the economy, there would be a tendency since the beginning of the last century for schools with links in the outside.