The education crisis has been an increasingly discussed current theme. Newspapers, magazines, all media, roughly speaking, has been exposing problems, which the education system has been going through. The amount of research on the topic is extensive - scholars have been incessantly questioning this crisis motives and its nature as well as possibilities to overpower it. The process of popularizing and democratizing school can be defined as the turning point, in which the rupture with the formely established equilibrium is characterised. It has been throughout this process that school started to admit a heterogeneous magnitude of students and, along with them, ambiguities and paradoxes loaded with a variety of issues that unsettled the age of certainties (reason). The ones inserted in the school crisis settings, for example teachers and students, are as a matter of course directly affected by such changes. According to authors like Bernard Charlot and Rui Canário, there has been a general gradual disenchantment concerning school - considering it does not account for the promisse of future professional success any longer. From the teacher‘s perspective, crisis-resulting conflicts are instantaneously reproduced in the classroom, thus altering their working condition. Presumably are indiscipline, violence and lack of concentrarion, signs of weariness from both teacher and student. Regarding the above depicted scenario, the present research implicates an attempt to the understanding of that what would be the meaning of schoolexperience to lower-class students. Namely, the answering of the following questions: Why does school matter? Which role does school play in these students lives? What does school mean to their futures? Do the students still perceive school as hope for social mobility? What do these students expect from school? The research main target involves listening to these students and then analysing their angst and expectations towards school. Inspired on ethnographics and with a qualitative approach, the fieldwork took place at a school located in one of the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro called Baixada Fluminense, where lessons, recreation as well as school excursions were attentively observed. In addition, the students have received an inquiry (for the drawing out of social-economic profile from the students) and took part in two workshops, where they were given the chance to write down and report their opinions on their own experiencing of school. The results evidence that, despite a certain loss of legitimacy, school still represents an opportunity of social assension to the students. Earning a school leaving certificate was revealed to be the meaning of school and it is with their thoughts on what this certificate could provide them in the future that they go to school everyday. All in all, school is portrayed as the major opportunity to reach a so desired “changing of life”. Therefore, the meaning of school is associated with the future. Presently, it is sociability that motivates students to keep going to school: making friends, conversations, experiences. Accordingly, school turns out to be the place where contact with others, with diversity - in other words, relationship - happens; the place where experiences are exchanged and identity constructed.