Resumo

COSTA, Jorge Adelino; NETO-MENDES, António  e  VENTURA, Alexandre. Private Tutoring as a subject in a case study: some results from Aquarela City. Rev. Lusófona de Educação [online]. 2009, n.13, pp.81-88. ISSN 1645-7250.

Although private tutoring is an activity still in the shadows, it is today an increasingly globalized phenomenon, whose economical-financial, political and pedagogical dimensions are still faraway from a thorough analysis and reflection. If students resorting to tutoring (family members, classmates, friends, and even teachers) has always constituted a reality present in the learning process, the exponential development that the private tutoring market has known in the last decades has given it very different contours, with the traditional “domestic tutor” being replaced by firms, economical groups and several types of franchising situations that are multiplied by thousands of centres that can be found across the world. In this text we aim to present some data gathered in the research that we have been conducting on this matter, namely the results of questionnaires filled out by 12th year students attending the secondary schools located in a Portuguese city, which we have named Aquarela City. We will also analyse the repercussions that the phenomenon introduces into the field of educational policies and its implications in students’ school results. If, in the sixties, Bourdieu and Passeron introduced us to the “heirs”, today, we have before us the “new heirs”, as these students, besides possessing the cultural capital discussed by these authors, have, simultaneously, access to more of the learning that is required by the school that they officially attend, through complementary private strategies that they use as a competitive edge in the competition with classmates that are less favoured by this double family inheritance.

Palavras-chave : private tutoring; market; schools; success; heirs.

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