Promessas, políticas e interrogações sobre as identidades dos sujeitos da eja

The field of Youth and Adult Education (known as EJA in Portuguese), especially since the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of Brazil in 1988, is tensioned between great promising aspirations and significant limitations. While, social consensus, as expressed in legal texts, around the idea that education is a social right that should be expanded to all regardless of age, seems to be evident this promising recognition is far from being a reality in Brazil. Some of the most pressing challenges are expressed in debates about the "right age to enter in EJA", the processes of "perverse migration" that expel young people from "regular schools" to EJA and the understanding of the heterogeneity of EJA's students as a deficit. To these already challenging situation we need to highlight the budget constraints and closures of classes, schools and programs, policies that undermine opportunities for learning that should underpin EJA's promise. In this text, we interrogate current policies, their promises, conceptual tensions and debates about the identities of EJA's subjects not only to identify problems, but, above all, to encourage pedagogical commitments to resist the weakening of EJA's field from the vantage point of recognizing the intersectionality of its subjects and assisted by the Freirean notion of "hope".