Scholastic Education and social exclusion: The perspective of young migrants

Abstract

Education presupposes the distinction between correct and wrong behaviour which becomes the reference point for an unequal distribution of censure and praise which have selective effects. Each selective action is an element in a self-supporting construction which gives confidence and credit, creating differing expectations in students with inevitable effects on their educational progress. In the face of increasingly multicultural schools we believe it to be necessary to ask ourselves how and to what extent educational selection has on the wider process of the social integration of migrant students. We seek to respond to these questions through a bottom down perspective, starting out from the words of migrant students attending a middle school in Modena.