Abstract
The article focuses on excerpts from a literature research on shadow education, exploring studies that represent each sub-theme and its main conclusions. Our analysis indicates that the concern with the production of educational inequalities permeates the research about shadow education, considering that these activities tend to promote an increase in educational distances among students placed different positions in the social space. It is also noteworthy that the competitive environment for relatively favorable school or university positions seems to foment the demand for supplementary educational activities in different contexts, and that the increase in the number of these kinds of activities tends to affect the practices of teachers and students in the regular education.
Keywords shadow education; supplementary education; educational inequalities