The study analyses how rural workers experience educational programmes which they affirm in their discourse to be a right, understood as a process that does not refer solely to formal guarantees, inscribed in law, but to the way in which social relations are structured. The research sought to identify explanations for the persistence of this population in educational processes marked by difficulties and insufficiencies. It examines to what degree the right to education has been instituted in the countryside. The field work was carried out in Baturité, in the state of Ceará, in the period 2005-2006 and included: observation in adult and youth education classrooms in three rural communities, group dynamics, interviews with trade unionists, rural teachers and students, members of associations and governmental technicians. The histories of schooling reveal trajectories of difficulties and deprivation and show that adult and youth education in the countryside is poor and is not included in the agendas of associations, trade unions and councils. We conclude that the experience depicts the denial of a right rather than its construction and that only well structured participative policies and incisive mobilizations will make the exercise of the right to education in the countryside possible.
right to education; rural workers; adult and youth education