["You learn, we teach"? Questioning relations between education and health from the perspective of vulnerability]

This article explores the meanings associated with the motto used in a World No-Tobacco Day campaign to stimulate a discussion of the principal underlying messages in the field of health education in Brazil. The study focuses on the concept of vulnerability to contextualize and explore its interfaces with education in order to highlight the theoretical, practical, and political productivity of the link between health education and studies on vulnerability. In conclusion, the necessary renewal of health practices in general and health education practices in particular can benefit tremendously from the vulnerability reference, to the extent that it demarcates a new horizon for situating and linking risks, "causalities", and "determinations", drawing health--as well as the possibility of illness--into the field of real life, into the world of inter-subjective relations, where these processes gain unique meanings.