Elementary education, in Brazil and in other countries, is continually being reformed. The historic passage from a school for the elite to a school for the masses coincides with a period in which the child comes to be seen as a citizen endowed with rights. The article shows how the student body in our time consists of children and adolescents of different social origins. Each has a life history which, for some, is "normal," but for others is characterized by a great variety of situations of social risk, marked by failure, disadvantages, malaise and suffering. At it is impossible to keep the social context from invading the classroom, there is a need to ponder the requirements and rights of a range of students in situations of disadvantage and social risk, difficulties in school achievement, difficulties related to expressions of hostility, difficulties in adaptation to the role of student and difficulties relative to social interaction. The article also shows how, in recent history, interpretation of the relationship between conditions of social disadvantage and instruction has been based on different hypotheses. Each of these hypotheses (socio-cultural disadvantage as diversity of talents, as a natural handicap or as a disadvantage of the structural type; disadvantages due to qualitative-organizational characteristics of the school, the school's incapacity to provide adequate teaching or a damaged teacher-student relationship) has, in the post-war period, adopted different models for facing the situation.
Social risk; School reform; Children's right; Social exclusion; Social responsability