This is a study of the impact of policies for the insertion of Information and Communication Technologies in public schools through an analysis of the school trajectories and opportunities for professional insertion for high school students in Brazil and Portugal. We analyze the mechanisms that structure the perceptions that students construct about their school experience in a context of the use of ITCs and the opportunities they have to enter the labor market based on what they can or cannot do with computers connected to a network. The background is the emergence in the 1990s of The National Computing in Education Program (Proinfo) in Brazil and the NÓNIO 21st CENTURY project, in Portugal with the declared goals of improving the quality of the  teaching-learning process and preparing students to exercise citizenship. It is in a context of global competition, new technologies, new work methods, the diversity of political and economic realities and changes in professional profiles, that the organization and steering of these national programs occurs and are justified. In this context, it is particularly interesting to study the basic presumption of these programs, which is the understanding that the insertion and use of ITCs improves school performance and assists professional insertion, because it approximates the school and thus the students in the education process to the reality of the world of labor. The scope of these programs are analyzed by means of empiric research among the students and their teachers. It is understood that it is possible to approximate the process of education and the labor process, because there is a transformation of raw material into a product and in this process can be discerned: labor relations, the objects of labor, instruments of labor and products (LESNE, 1984). In this sense, the indicators are: the characterization of the “object” of work (youth in the last year of high school); the relations that these youth/object have with the instruments of labor (computers and the internet); labor relations (pedagogical relations) induced by the new instruments of labor; the final product (the nature of the qualifications produced by the use of computers in the school context); their relationship   with the socioeconomic space where the “exchange value” of the product can be realized (the labor market).The interest was in studying what Brazilian and Portuguese teachers and students do with the ITCs that have had a constant although not a large scale presence in schools for required education in the past 10 years. The study is based on the following question: do the uses of ITCs in teaching and learning processes in a school environment influence the quality of school performance of students and provide them better conditions for professional insertion or to continue their studies? What do students, teachers and scholars have to say about this and what are the directions and states of their discourses?

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