As lições dos alunos: o futuro da educação antecipado por vozes de crianças e jovens

Students are who can better tell us about their own experience at school. However, their voices are not always heard and considered when it comes to thinking about improving schools and education. In this text, we present and analyse, on the one hand, the “voices” of kindergarten children, collected through group and individual works, posters and drawings; on the other hand, the voices of students in the second and third cycles of basic education (up to 6th and 9th schooling years, respectively), collected in unstructured group interviews. We asked all of them for their ideas about the future of education. The results may be surprising, given the quality of the reflection and acuity of the analysis, but also because they allow reflect – an exercise that can be useful to all social actors involved in and by the school dynamics – about the life of schools in many of its facets: teachers and pedagogical activity, classes and study visits, educational provision, educational spaces and resources, organization of school activity. In summary, we would say that only with students, and by the way of a dialogued and built together narrative, it is possible to enhance the strengths of the schools and think about alternatives to school processes that have proven to be ineffective.