This article tries to disentangle the meanings assigned to school experience, in context of the contemporary changes. Given several studies that diagnose the secondary school crisis, we tried to open the range of meanings that arise from the students' words, interviewed in four Argentine jurisdictions. From their expressions it is possible to identify shared senses of their school stage that prevail over the differences. In contrast with the expected results, not only there appear senses common to schools but they refer mostly to the historic and more traditional ones. Together with them, "hybrid" meanings appear in the students' answers that put in dialogue the traditional school functions with the current processes of change. Furthermore, we identified "emerging" meanings that suppose a breaking point with the historic mandates and constitute relevant keys to think about the meaning of school in the present.
