The present study has the purpose of examining, from a reflection on the history of adult education, the successive educational policies destined to individuals who are 15 years old or more and were unable to continue studying. Since the early Brazilian Republic, adult education is based on popular education, which frequently rejected permanent programs. Therefore, the educational level of youngsters and adults has not achieved significant progress. On the other hand, intensive (supletivo) adult education is a constant in our history, being organized according to labor market demands. With the employment crisis, which worsened since the 1990s, a situation that extinguished hundreds of labor positions, adult education has changed its focus. The advance of neoliberalism, emphasizing multi-purpose, proactive, autonomous and flexible workers, has classified labor achievements of the past - which somehow protected workers from inequalities caused by capital - as obsolete and retrograde. Such older labor achievements were denounced as responsible for the capitalist crisis, and workers who symbolized an age of class progress and unions were kept away from the scarce job offers. Since the 1980s, in Brazil, the young individual, an icon of such new times, has been retrieved and brought back to the scene. Such labor actions, being connected to the history of adult education, have lead us to investigate how the phenomenon of juvenilization is taking place within Juvenile and Adult Education programs. We have decided to focus our studies on a basic education program named Projeto de Educação Juvenil (PEJ, Juvenile Education Project) by the Municipal Education Department of the City of Rio de Janeiro, seeking to understand how the relations between youngsters and adults are being structured within this Project.