This article discusses the influence of the schooling process in the mental and cultural development of students in education for young people and adults (EJA) based on questions constructed during a master's research titled Education for young people and adults: new reading practices for constructing new identities. The empirical study is situated in the accounts of the life stories and reading practices of students in a beginning class of literacy learning for young people and adults of Belo Horizonte municipal public system. These reports enabled them to build their discourses about their ways of being in the world and their social practices, now from the perspective of subjects included in the universe of written language. Moreover, they prompted some questions: What are the senses that young people and adults with little or no schooling build when they participate in the literacy process in school? Does the teaching of scientific and school concepts trigger mental and cultural developmental processes in young and adult illiterates? In order to try to answer such questions, we established a dialogue between the contributions of the cultural-historical psychology of Lev S. Vygotsky, the process of literacy and awareness of Paulo Freire and interactional ethnography. The analysis of aspects of mental and cultural development of one of the students - aspects gestated socially and discursively within and outside the school through the mediation of social and educational practices experienced in his educational process - reveals that the teaching of scientific and school knowledge allowed that student to have new social practices at work, at church and in the family, giving a new meaning to his condition of being in the world.
Learning; Development; Education for young people and adults