Social and educational exclusion as failures. Framework for their understanding and research

Abstract

Social exclusion is a concept that aims to explain theoretically a series of facts, generally social and economic, related to the lost or denial of those main rights that define social citizenship. Social analysts offer a list of factors causing exclusion, explanatory paradigms, etc., in order to explain this complex phenomenon, mentioning insistently its character as a multidimensional process. But it is necessary to go one step further and understand the causes, genesis and history of every single case, to grasp the real meaning of social exclusion. Institutionalized education, specially in a neoliberal and mercantilist context, appears in this debate as an essential dimension for its definition, given the fact that the lack of it produces in every individual a series of facts related to their academic career, their personal biographies, their relationships and the existence of emotional and social support, etc., that would make them vulnerable, as illiterates, as individual without the basic qualifications or the main competences that are necessary to cope with as an active citizen in the plural societies of this century. Equity, education in all aspects and dimensions, and the preoccupation for and sensitivity to social problems, are pedagogical principles that should be part of the political agendas so as to avoid the alignment of both concepts: education and social exclusion.