This article aims to investigate school dropout before the completion of compulsory education. The material consisted of the life stories of 26 adult learners at the Second Chance Schools (SCS), which were analysed using the biographical method. Interviews were also held with 4 teachers at the SCS. The questions were organised around five axes: childhood pathways, reasons for dropping out of school, consequences of this decision in their life, reasons for re-entering education and additional biographical designs. Four thematic fields emerged, based on which school dropout is articulated narratively and given meaning as a life choice: a) early involvement with the job market or the creation of a family, b) family life as a "problematic situation", c) emigration and d) learning difficulties.

The aim of this article is to capture the generic process which shapes the reasons Second Chance Schools’ students set out for enrolling in them and for approaching lifelong learning. We theoretically frame motivations as having relational and temporal emergence and as embedded in their lifeworld experiences which have to be narratively reconstructed in order for the students to take life decisions. Through biographical interviews with adult students attending a Second Chance School in Greece, we identified the role of life-disrupting events in this process and their core dynamic in forming motivational pathways. We argue that life disruptions fuel four different kinds of biographical gestalts, within each of which students develop a peculiar narrative reasoning for their enrollment in Second Chance School. Stigma, emancipation, biographical suffering, and work improvement constitute four distinct biographical gestalts, in which specific life disruptions are tied up with how adult students construct their motivational orientation toward lifelong learning throughout their lives.