The thesis proposes to discuss the emergence of young people from popular classes educated on the international and Brazilian scene, assuming that the youth issue was largely transformed with the expansion of access to public high schools in the USA and Europe from the 1950 onwards. and in Brazil from the 1990s onwards. In this sense, our discussion aims to confront the debate on how new popular and peripheral youth, and new spaces of conflict and assertion of rights that are public schools, gain centrality. To this end, our work assumes that, throughout this period, we experienced an intense debate about the place and meaning of youth in the life of a country that is still experiencing a process of democratization that also materializes in the democratization of access to youth enjoyment.. In order to empirically explore this issue, we chose four moments as especially important that took place between the years 2000 and 2017: the National Youth Conferences, the June 2013 Days, the School Occupation Movement, and the debate that led to the Reform of Secondary Education and the New EM Law. On the other hand, we seek to articulate this empirical analysis with a theoretical debate that considers the youth issue and its relationship with school, as well as its presence as a protagonist of activism and social movements; and on the other hand, the debate about high school as a place for political disputes.