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This paper analyzes how children and teenagers whom we call "reluctant students" are often, anything but reluctant to learn some things. They show all kinds of signs of imaginative participation- but their participation seems unable to connect with the school syllabus. We could wonder: How could we manage to have a curriculum so imaginative and attractive as the world that is exposed to the students? A new answer for some or a lot of those students could come from Lev Vygotsky's research (1962, 1997). His notion of "cognitive tools" gives us a way to explore how we could capture and involve those students' imagination to make them see that, what is really wonderful and engaging in the syllabus, could be learnt by anyone and could be turned into a cognitive tool. In this paper we shall see how the cognitive tools to make up stories, the binary opposites and the images generated through words, could be used in a new way. Each of them was at one point, a considerable important cultural invention, and each of them turns now, into a potential cognitive tool to increase our ability to think, communicate and understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article derives from an ongoing research work aimed at studying formative experiences that take place in primary schools in Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. In this context, the paper analyzes the characteristics of the educational proposal for one specific subject of the first tier, as it is delineated by the official curriculum. Through an analytical reading of the document that focuses on its discursive features, it is argued that the curriculum would configure a paradoxical experience of detachment as a formative plan for the students. It is shown how the official pedagogic discourse articulates an instructional and expressive order that simultaneously would pursue the reconstruction of ideas and the production of predominantly rational agents. The transmission of a code aspiring to a detached relation between the agents and the world as a particular relationship with knowledge is thought to be fundamental in that discourse. The analysis shares broader reflections that invite to rethink the ways in which curriculum policies contribute to configure meanings and conditions for school experiences at the primary level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the official proposal for recent history teaching. For such purpose, we draw on national education laws (1993 and 2006), the curricula approved from 1995 to present for the secondary level (at the national level and at the Province of Buenos Aires) and regulations of the commemorations--especially March 24th and September 16th--. This analysis will be made in relation to the representations of memory and the progress of historiography about recent past, to consider up to what extent school contents have witnessed an impact due to changes in these narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]