Adolescents' malaise when returning to school in person: losses and gains

Abstract

This present article discusses the discontentment of teenagers from two public schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the context of returning to face-to-face classes after the COVID-19 pandemic. During the isolation context, the school had to resignify itself as a place of learning, coexistence and

mediation with technologies that were absent until then, and presently has to restore itself, territorially, as a possible place of affection and transmission. The school is one of the instances that takes care of this charge, in which the game of forces between groups and subjectivity is present. Notwithstanding, the school’s territorial absence in the period of isolation was unavoidable. The main question this article seeks to answer is how the freudian assumption that dissatisfaction is part of and inherent in the relationship between the subject and culture, appears, and under what aspects, in this experience of returning to schools, in the post-pandemic period. Whether in learning disabilities, towards the place of the other, in the conflict between temporality and demand, in coping strategies and in the distance between projects and reality, students reveal their angsts and new ways of dealing with the condition of discontentment.