The 2011 Chilean student movement against neoliberal educational policies (original) (raw)
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The Chilean student movement of 2011-2012: challenging the marketization of education
2010
According to mainstream international analysis (e. g. United Nations 2011), Chile is one Latin America’s “best students”. The first country in the region to implement drastic neoliberal reforms in the mid-1970s, Chile sustained impressive rates of economic growth and reduced poverty to a third in the last two decades. All this took place in the midst of political stability, regular elections, and a high respect for civic and political liberties by regional standards. In 2011, however, Chile caught the attention of the world not for its macroeconomic numbers but for an unprecedented wave of social protest against the government and the state of its educational system. While the first protests in May of that year brought to the street a few thousands secondary and tertiary students, by August protesters reached an estimated peak of about 200,000 and included not only students but also their families, workers, environmental activists, indigenous peoples, and a heterogeneous mass of cit...
"No se Vende la Educación": the Chilean Student Movement contests the Neoliberal Project.
In 1973 the Pinochet dictatorship radically transformed the Chilean state and its role in society through the implementation of the neoliberal policies based in free market liberalism, transforming higher education and social programs. This paper analyzes how the Chilean university student movement, gaining momentum in 2011, challenged the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship through its demands of education reform by challenging the neoliberal structure of higher education, its effects on Chilean concepts of education, and their basis in a neoliberal Chilean state and society. This paper uses interviews, speeches, articles, and performance to analyze how Chilean students contest the neoliberal project through framing, embodied performance, and student organizing bodies. There is particular focus on how the historical and cultural context of Chile affects how the movement develops alternative ideas and social values to construct identity, meaning and imagined alternatives. Finally, this paper connects the student movement to greater Latin American trends of contesting neoliberalism and illustrates how social movements are a dynamic moment in long-term processes of social contention.
This paper provides a report on the Chilean student movement, 2011 -2014, from the perspective of the students themselves, based on the main research question: are the student protests for reform or revolution? The research data was collected during October 2013 before the Chilean Presidential and Parliamentary elections using the methodology of 'live methods', including ethnography to capture the live action we are researching as well as a particular analytical framework through which the action can be interpreted. The analytical framework is made up of paradigms which seek to understand radical political social transformation: charisma, social movement theory, an historical-materialist political economy, and a critique of political economy based on an interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value in a postcolonial context. We refer to this methodology and methods as 'political sociology for action'. Each of these paradigms are elaborated with reference to an exemplary publication that deals with the Chilean situation in particular and Latin America more generally. The paper maintains that the students have developed a sophisticated consciousness in relation to the problems and possibilities of charismatic leadership, an awareness of the power and complexity of their own position as a social movement, together with a strong understanding of the need to contextualise their resistance within a particular version of political economy: neoliberalism.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2017
This article analyses the material and ideological implications of a highly commodified mass higher education system on the 2011 students' mobilisations in Chile. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data, we show that the grievances denounced by the movement emerged from the differences in the process of socialisation/reproduction of intellectual labour among universities, which in turn correspond to forms of class exploitation. Moreover, we demonstrate that students' engagement in/with the movement varies across universities in accordance with the differentiation of these institutions along class and political cleavages. The article offers insights to understand why a sectoral conflict became the most significant challenge to the neoliberal consensus that has prevailed since the late-1980s.
Mass Higher Education and the 2011 Student Movement in Chile: Material and Ideological Implications
This article analyses the material and ideological implications of a highly commodified mass higher education system on the 2011 students' mobilisations in Chile. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data, we show that the grievances denounced by the movement emerged from the differences in the process of socialisation/reproduction of intellectual labour among universities, which in turn correspond to forms of class exploitation. Moreover, we demonstrate that students' engagement in/with the movement varies across universities in accordance with the differentiation of these institutions along class and political cleavages. The article offers insights to understand why a sectoral conflict became the most significant challenge to the neoliberal consensus that has prevailed since the late-1980s.
Undoing the Neoliberal Higher Education System? Student Protests and the Bachelet Reforms in Chile
This article focuses on the education reforms of the current government of Michelle Bachelet (Chile, 2014-2018). These reforms were triggered by the student protests of 2011 – the " Chilean winter " – and the overwhelming support of the public for the movement's demands. The students' main demands included free education and a greater involvement of the state in education. The parties of the centre-left alliance, then the opposition, embraced these demands and promised broad educational reforms including free post-secondary education. After the center-left coalition (Nueva Mayoría, New Majority) won the presidential election it introduced three major education bills: the " short law " of free education, the creation of two new public universities and fifteen Centers of Technical Formation, and the reform of higher education's regulatory framework (still under discussion in parliament). While these bills are aimed at increasing the state's role in higher education, they fall far short of the students' aspirations. In fact, as implemented the bill have consolidated a mixed public-private higher education model resting on a vision of post-secondary education as a marketplace in which institutions compete for students, subsidies and funding. The conclusion discusses the inherent limitations of these reforms, especially how the weakness of a welfare coalition made it impossible to transform the students' demands into sustainable higher education policy.
Educational Opportunity and Contentious Politics: The 2011 Chilean Student Movement
The 2011 Chilean student movement was one of the most massive and original processes of social mobilization in Latin America in the last decade. Led by university students, the movement challenged the longstanding free-market orientation of educational policies in Chile, demanding a more active role for the State in the regulation and supply of education. In this article, we study the main educational and social factors that explain the emergence of the movement. We draw upon social movement theory as an analytical framework and use newspaper articles as basic sources of data. Our research suggests that the simultaneous expansion and privatization of the Chilean education system provided students not only with mobilizing grievances (e.g., disparity in access and quality) but also with capabilities and resources (e.g., critical awareness and higher aspirations) to advance political mobilization. We also find that student organizations created effective frames to take advantage of the windows of opportunity opened in Chilean democracy. Implications for comparative international research on education reform and social movements are also discussed.
The Student Movement in Chile 2011-2012: Rearming the critique of capitalism in:
African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity: Past Oppression, Future Justice? (Peter Wagner, ed.), 2015
The paper tries to understand the critiques raised by the Chilean student movement of 2011-2012 as part of the main critiques, in Luc Boltanski's terms, that historically have been made to capitalism. In this sense, the student movement would not be a problem of not satisfied individual expectations, but a verification of the not fulfilled promises of justice, equality, common wealth, freedom and collective autonomy of current Chilean capitalism model and political system. https://books.google.cl/books?id=1wzdCQAAQBAJ&pg=PT6&lpg=PT6&dq=indignation+an+claims+peter+wagner&source=bl&ots=Khz1HaP7qy&sig=6EIeAAhvZFXiIRx8nhdF-U1fMI8&hl=es-419&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6x5iyjdnbAhUEhZAKHS0CCx0Q6AEIPjAD#v=onepage&q=indignation%20an%20claims%20peter%20wagner&f=false
Social Movement Studies Student movements in the age of austerity. The cases of Chile and England
Several recent episodes of massive student protests in countries in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, raise the question of whether we are witnessing to a new surge of student protests. This profile offers an interpretation of the socio-economic and political processes that have caused contentious reactions among students, paying special attention to changes in the major characteristics of the higher education sector. In last decades, governments of all colors have enacted laws promoting the outsourcing of personnel, the managerialization of governing bodies, and the introduction of tuition fees as well as cuts to public funding. These changes are inspired by a new paradigm, which promotes the ‘discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of the competition.’ In this context, various forms of resistance and opposition can be observed. Here, we focus on three dimensions: (1) financing and autonomy of universities; (2) governance and managerialization; (3) precarization of labor conditions. The profile shows how recent protests in Chile and England are related to changes in the afore-mentioned dimensions. We conclude that the reappearance of students as political actors is related to the emergence of a range of distributional conflicts stemming from the implementation of the neoliberal agenda in the field of higher education.