Down on luck but will fight to the death: Poverty and school failure in a life history

The school failure has been little explored from the experience. Structuralist theories offer deterministic and crippling explanations, and current analysis of the phenomenon tend to turn social conflicts into psychological problems. Therefore, bringing educational research into school experience help us to see how the context affects the disadvantaged children, and how they respond to educational and social system in a negotiation process clearly unbalanced. This is the main value of the present document. It is an abstract of a biographical research that inquires into the life of Medina, an adolescent who comes from a marginal context and narrates his experiences in and outside the school from the juvenile detention centre where he is locked. It offers a wide vision of the social route that he has crossed throughout his life. The research shows a class differentiation that divides the society in two: you, the good ones; and we, the bad ones. The school failure, fruit of this division, leaves place to the social failure, provoking 'guerrillas against the good ones' of boys who have learned to devalue itself like people and group. But to accept their status as 'bad' serves to assert themselves and fight against those who seek to devote ourselves to what they do not want to be and a position they do not want to occupy. They become 'warriors' who struggle against a social system that marginalizes them, even if it means taking them to their own destruction.