The present study investigates how students of a public school located in the Baixada Fluminense, by means of narrative patterns of organizing social experience, construct values and selves related to an ethos which conceives formal education as a path to upward social mobility. The research was developed at the Celso Suckow da Fonseca Federal Center for Technological Education (CEFET/RJ), more specifically at the Nova Iguaçu Decentralized Unit (UnED). This institution, a historical symbol of tradition in vocational education, is resignified upon being opened in a peripheral socio-geographical region, contributing, at the same time, to altering the field of possibilities of the local young generations, marked by working class trajectories. The analytical trajectory of this research aimed to ally systematic observation and description of social life with a close look at the discursive materiality sewn together in narrative modes. Therefore, initially the study revisited the research on oral narratives in the field of Language Studies of sociointeractional orientation. Particular prominence was given to the notion of narrative/identity performance as well as to the strong imbrication between narratives and identity construction. It is considered that, in the interactional stage of societal life, people act in such a way as to transmit to their interlocutors an image of themselves based on socially valued moral attributes. By making use of formal linguistic devices of performance, narrators ideologically position themselves in relation to narrated events and echo the legitimate moral values of their social environment. This study, then, presented some well-known contributions from social research, especially from Anthropology of Complex Societies, focusing on how the notions of project and mobility provide a better understanding of the value which is attributed to upward social mobility in the modern-contemporary world. Based on contemporary anthropological literature, the traditional ethos of middle and working classes were discussed and particular emphasis was given to the status attributed to education as a path to upward social mobility, as well as to the symbolic consequences of such mobility for the working classes. The study is affiliated with the interpretative methodology of research in the Social Sciences, in which ethnography and participant observation are considered significant modes of producing knowledge about social life. The analysis of oral data generated in interviews with students of the Nova Iguaçu UnED of the CEFET/RJ attempted to highlight the narrative organization and the evaluation devices employed by narrators in the discursive construction of the values and beliefs morally recognized as valid inside the institution, as well as in the social geographic region in which it is located. The narratives studied suggest the coexistence of two particular ethos: the first, marked by processes of individualization and self-affirmation, provided by school education; the second, associated with networks of local solidarity and relationships, typical in working classes. Finally, this research frames this institution as a microcosmos of the changes lived in the Baixada Fluminense and gives visibility to a specific portion of its population which conceives education as the safest and worthiest way of improving their lives.