Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 21 Issue 5

characterize the production of this type of knowledge. As Jean-Louis Besson (1995, p. 32) warns, “we must now realize that we are not dealing with a simple picture that we could compare with what we see.” That is, statistics do not “reveal” reality. Rather, they integrate and participate in its construction insofar as they conform to the ways in which the real is perceived . 3 In view of these considerations, it is important to mention the senses found, from the investigation of the documentary corpus , for the following terms: failure, retention and repetition. Failure refers, in the period examined, to the results in exams or final evaluations indicating that the student did not attain the minimum performance level expected. Retention is a consequence of this failure, since it determines, assuming the serial teaching model, the student’s inability to follow in the normal flow from one grade to the next. On the other hand, repetition points to the phenomenon of students remaining in the school because they were retained in a certain grade, who will be submitted to attending it again. The understanding of these senses, as already argued, is not given for any historical period. Thus, we need to consider that the current sense that we give to these terms has been formed progressively. It should be remembered that for a long period – and this is also the case today in certain levels or modalities of teaching – in the face of retention, students often dropped out of school. Such dropping out was often seen as quite natural, allowing us to Such choices, although not fully conscious, are linked to the motivations that led to doing the research and correspond to necessary cutouts that result in an always necessarily partial angle. The choice of this theoretical approach defines my intention to show that the school situation that in the twentieth century comes to be described as a problem of student flow through the school is a historical construction that involves both numbers and words. In this sense, it is important, on the one hand, to consider, as suggested above, that statistics are representations constructed from certain conditions and that they end up collaborating in the construction of certain social situations, although they are referred to as an instrument of mere description of these situations. On the other hand, it is important to stress that, in the historical analysis of these processes, it must be considered that statistics are produced linked to words (categories) whose choice and definition precede the collection of numbers. Such words have no unambiguous meaning in their own period of use and, over time, are interpreted in different ways. 3 In this regard it should be noted that it is assumed here that statistics exert what Bourdieu (1998) calls the “theory effect”, since, by producing forms of world's intelligibility, they create the conditions of existence of what they describe. suppose that the school results were experienced as a sentence of the individuals’ (in) abilities and (im) possibilities to continue going to school. It is only with compulsory schooling, linked to the social realization of the advantages of schooling for the whole population, that the permanence in school will prevail, even in the face of negative outcomes, such as failure. It is in this context that a student taking the same grade again becomes permissible and, increasingly, obligatory, making repetition quantitatively expressive. That is, these movements were not always assumed as a political-educational problem. These occurrences will be considered as distortions of the path of students only in the twentieth century, when the expectation is that everyone attends and completes primary education. Until the 1930s, in Brazil, the debate revolved around the issue of children's access to school, evoking both the lack of schools and adequate facilities to serve the population and families’ lack of interest in sending and keeping their children in school. From that point on, there was concern that even if children went to school, still they had no guarantee of pass and permanence in the institution. As a result, debates about the need for policies that could make teaching more efficient and prevent students from failing and dropping out of school were recurrent. In the 1940s, the issue of grade repetition is mentioned in reports, but it is only in the 1970s and 1980s that there is a significant debate describing it as an undesirable phenomenon to be addressed by public policy makers. It is thus important to emphasize that social situations only engage governmental officials when certain conditions are present. John W. Kingdon (1995, p.109-110) 4 4 I would like to thank Libia Aquino for alerting me about the relevance of John Kingdon’s studies to understand the configuration of political problems. , in a study that seeks to understand how items enter or leave the political agenda and why some items and alternatives gain prominence, while others are neglected, states that “situations are defined as problems when we come to believe that we should do something to change them. Problems are not simply the conditions or external events themselves; there is also a perceptual, interpretive element.” For a given situation to be assumed as a problem, a set of elements must be present, such as the value given to the observations, the comparisons made and the categories mobilized to describe this situation. Thus, the same situation can be understood as a problem or not, depending on the value that the subjects responsible for the definition of the agenda give to it and if they consider that it is an issue on which it is possible to act. Also, comparisons between situations can cause a problem to be delineated. Kingdon (1995, p. 11) points out that “if one is not achieving what others are achieving, and if one believes in equality, then the relative disadvantage Volume XXI Issue V Version I 45 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 C © 2021 Global Journals School Grade Repetition in Brazil: History of the Configuration of a Political and Educational Problem