This text aims to investigate the scope of the meritocratic culture that pervades education, focusing specifically on Education for Young People and Adults. The field research was carried out by means of semi-structured interviews with eight teachers of Young People and Adults, which were recorded and then transcribed and analyzed. In the analysis, it was observed that the teachers consistently indicated meritocracy as both the cause and the solution, for the problems of society and educational problems. To understand and challenge these explanations, we linked them to the understanding of culture, which is seen as a process of constructing meaning. Meritocracy is part of this process of cultural construction, and contributes to the construction of an individualism in which each person is seen as responsible for what he or she is, for what he or she can own and for the place he or she occupies in society. This culturally constructed meaning, in the current context, is, as this article demonstrates, prevalent in the Education of Young People and Adults, through the discourses of the teachers themselves. Thus, teachers view the Young People and Adult students as people who have realized that their way out of their state of exclusion lies within themselves as individuals, rather than in the collective struggle as postulated by critical theory.