Abstract
The free-market educational model implemented in Chile after Pinochet involved steady privatization and the resulting inequality and discrimination in access to university education. This educational neoliberalism was hotly contested by massive student demonstrations. In Bachelet’s second government (2014–2018), the political impact and ramifications of the 2011 student movement initiated a series of educational and political changes, among them free university education, tax reform focused on improvements in income distribution, and the end of the binominal system of congressional elections. At the same time, many of the principles of market education continued. Since the effects of free-market education became a social and political problem, the students’ demands went beyond the limits of the educational sector itself to become a central part of debate on the structural inequalities produced by the post-Pinochet neoliberal model, a conflict that exploded in Chile in October 2019.
El modelo educativo de libre mercado implementado en Chile después de Pinochet implicó una constante privatización y la consiguiente desigualdad y discriminación en el acceso a la educación universitaria. Este neoliberalismo educativo fue fuertemente contestado por masivas manifestaciones estudiantiles. En el segundo gobierno de Bachelet (2014–2018), el impacto político y las ramificaciones del movimiento estudiantil de 2011 dieron pie a una serie de cambios educativos y políticos, entre ellos la educación universitaria gratuita, una reforma tributaria enfocada en mejorar la distribución del ingreso y el fin del sistema binominal de elecciones parlamentarias. Al mismo tiempo, se mantuvieron muchos de los principios de la educación de mercado. Desde que los efectos de la educación de libre mercado se convirtieron en un problema social y político, las demandas de los estudiantes han rebasado los límites del propio sector educativo para convertirse en una parte central del debate sobre las desigualdades estructurales producidas por el modelo neoliberal post-Pinochet, un conflicto que estalló en Chile en octubre de 2019.
Chile can be seen as an emblematic case in the implementation of reforms aimed at privatization of the educational model (Bellei, 2015; Kubal and Fisher, 2016). During the 1980s, the Pinochet dictatorship employed a set of neoliberal principles to reform the economy in various sectors. Education became one of its primary examples by implementing the neoliberal orthodoxy of the Chilean economists dubbed the “Chicago Boys” 1 (Austin, 2004; Pitton, 2007). Among their measures were a drive toward privatization of the educational system through public subsidies, minimizing the state’s authority in the oversight and regulation of education, the freedom of private administrators to create universities and schools, the decentralization of public schools, and the reduction of their public funding (Aedo-Richmond, 2000; Bellei, 2015; Austin, 2004).
This approach to education was affirmed on March 7, 1990, the final day of the Pinochet regime, with the passage of a neoliberal-based code that regulated the Chilean educational system until 2009. The law provided broad opportunities for businesses and private organizations—such as transnational educational corporations like Laureate International Universities and religious congregations—to create and manage educational establishments at all levels (preschool, K-12, and higher education) either through state subsidies or by charging students’ families. Meanwhile, the state was left with limited tools to regulate the educational system and control the quality of the instruction provided by these institutions.
The coming to power of Concertación 2 administrations in 1990 did not represent a change in these neoliberal principles in education; rather, there was an attempt to control their effects through policies for remedying educational inequalities, the low quality of learning, and the adverse material conditions of lower-income students (Picazo, 2010). 3 Using the argument of expanding educational coverage as a means of reducing inequalities, competition was promoted between public and private institutions. The increase in coverage revolved around incentives to participation by the private sector, resulting in a steady reduction of the public sector in education. For example, although Concertación governments stressed the gradual increase in the number of students with access to higher education, for many of these students this was accomplished by taking out expensive bank loans. In the face of this rhetoric, demonstrations took place expressing student dissatisfaction with the market policies implemented in secondary and university education and their effects on inequality in the educational system (Kubal and Fisher, 2016; Grugel and Nem Singh, 2015; Torres, 2012).
The educational problem had already appeared on academic and political agendas in the early 2000s, when various studies indicated atypically low public sector participation in the Chilean educational system and marked inequality and segregation of institutions by socioeconomic group (OECD, 2004; 2009). Starting in 2006—the point at which a massive movement of secondary school students decried the inequality of the educational model—the effects of neoliberalism in education emerged as a public problem. The “Penguins’ Revolution” denounced the principles of the dictatorship’s education system and its consolidation in the educational reforms of the Concertación (Ruiz, 2012; Torres, 2014; Kubal and Fisher, 2016).
This social reaction to free-market education intensified during 2011, when for more than six months a new mobilization of university and secondary school students demanded greater participation of the state in the educational system, free higher education, and an end to private institutions’ profiting from education. The 2011 student movement became one of the most significant social mobilizations since the return to democracy, ushering in a new phase of debate on the state, educational policies, and the neoliberal model in post-Pinochet society (Cabalín, 2012; Bellei, Cabalín, and Orellana, 2014; Torres and Sánchez, 2019).
The effects of neoliberalism’s continuity under democracy made education one of the principal sources of social conflict (Cabalín, 2012; Grugel and Nem Singh, 2015). This article examines the constraints of the post-Pinochet educational project in relation to the massive student demonstrations just described. The first section considers the continuance of the dictatorship’s neoliberal principles under Concertación administrations. Analyzing the educational model pursued since 1990, I show its principal effects in the realm of higher education: the increasing privatization of the educational system and the inequality and segregation affecting access to university education. In the second section I discuss the way in which this educational neoliberalism was disputed by the student demonstrations of 2006 and 2011. In the third section I assess the educational reforms of Michelle Bachelet’s second term (2014–2018), a political project inherited from the Concertación, which, although it revived some of the demands made by the student mobilization, was hotly contested politically and forced to forgo structural changes and commit to a reform project framed by the logic of a market educational system. In the last section I reflect on the political ramifications of the student mobilizations, looking at whether the new political context since October 18, 2019, can prevail over the constraints of the post-Pinochet educational model.
The Post-Pinochet Educational Model and the Effects of Neoliberal Education
Garretón (2007) has argued that the Concertación governments pursued a “post-Pinochet” societal model. In political terms, according to Ruiz (2012), their decision to align themselves with the pro-Pinochet elite to carry out a democratic transition greatly impacted the democratic model implemented since 1990. In addition to the constitution that had governed Chile since 1980, the Pinochet dictatorship left a legal framework that regulated the country in various domains: public administration, the creation of political parties, and the implementation of a binominal electoral system that prevented proportional representation for political parties, fostering an overrepresentation of right-wing parties in Congress (a law that was repealed in 2015). This legal framework, which required high quorum numbers in Congress to change, allows us to classify the political system that has governed Chile since 1990 as an “incomplete democracy” or a “post-Pinochet democracy” (Garretón, 2007; 2012).
For Ruiz (2012), one of the main objectives of this incomplete democracy was the stability of the neoliberal economy. According to Bresnahan (2003), it was in the economic realm that the Concertación presented a project that intentionally continued the dictatorship’s neoliberal principles. The implementation of the “Chilean model” (Nef, 2003) was a project of public subsidies and social policies, a proposal that Concertación administrations attempted to encapsulate with the phrase “growth with equity” (Davis-Hamel, 2012). On the one hand, the Concertación adopted much of the neoliberal approach: liberalization of trade, reduction of public services through participation of the private sector, and privatization of public enterprises (Nef, 2003; Ruiz, 2019). On the other, it sought to reduce poverty and inequality through largely technocratic social policies that involved subsidizing the low-income sectors or motivating the private sector to participate in social programs (Ruiz, 2012; Hidalgo, 2011). The proposal to associate the free market with social policies under the Concertación administrations has been described as a “tempered neoliberalism” (Garretón, 2012).
Education also underwent this process. Some have pointed out that the educational project of the Concertación was characterized by continuities with and adjustments to the dictatorship’s model (Picazo, 2010; Garretón, 2012). Although a gradual transformation of the educational agenda had been proposed since 1990, with the public sector developing greater ability to attempt to reduce the effects of neoliberal education (Picazo, 2010), in structural terms the above-mentioned principles of the dictatorship’s educational system were continued (Austin and Araya, 2004; Garretón, 2007). The rationale was applied both in university education and in the rest of the system. As Bellei (2015) indicates, while privatization of education was never explicitly mentioned in Concertación administrations, the policies implemented facilitated it.
Privatization and Commercialization of Higher Education
Under the neoliberal reforms of the dictatorship in the 1980s, the Chilean university system underwent profound changes aimed at its privatization and deregulation. In December 1980, Decree 3.541 deregulated the creation of private higher education institutions. The authority and scope of state universities were limited, and requirements for the private establishment of universities and autonomous technical-professional institutions were reduced. Following this reform, a steady increase in private higher education institutions occurred (Pitton, 2007; Austin, 2004). For example, between 1981 and 1990, 40 private universities and a much larger number of higher education technical establishments were founded (Table 1).
Number of Higher Education Institutions (1980–2010)
Source: Data from SIES (2012).
Under the free-market educational model, access to higher education was not a social right. On the contrary, university education was conceived of as an individual economic benefit that should not be financed by the state: the student and his/her family should mainly assume its cost (Espinoza and González, 2013; Austin, 2004). The reduction in public expenditures for higher education meant that state universities should be self-financed, primarily by charging students. This meant that the cost of studying at public universities was similar to that in private institutions, gradually positioning Chile over the past 10 years as the country with the proportionally highest university costs in the region and among OECD member countries (OECD, 2017). Since 1990, the Concertación administrations’ policies have been geared toward expanding enrollment in higher education in the hope of greater democratization of access to university and technical-professional education but without reforming the structural framework inherited from the dictatorship (Austin and Araya, 2004). Although the state regained aspects of regulation such as the power to ensure minimum standards in creating private educational institutions and the provision of public financing for long-standing universities (OECD, 2009), the policy was primarily aimed at increasing coverage rather than at strengthening public universities. In this context, private institutions played an important role, gradually achieving the largest number of universities and enrollment (Figure 1).
Enrollment in universities (undergraduate) by type of institution, 2000–2012 (data from SIES, 2012). *Public and private universities belonging to the Consejo de Rectores de Universidades de Chile (CRUCH), which receive direct funding from the state. **Universities created after 1981, which do not receive direct funding from the state.
With this logic of expanding access to higher education through subsidizing demand, in the mid-2000s a system called créditos con aval del Estado (credit guaranteed by the state) was created that allowed private banks to grant students credit with a state guarantee. According to the authorities, this policy sought to allow lower-income students—who had not received scholarships or funds for their studies—to finance their university training through bank loans. However, the strict payment conditions and high interest rates produced significant overindebtedness in these young people. It is estimated that a student with this credit finished his/her studies with a debt of US$20,000–30,000 (Mönckeberg, 2013). Both its medium-term effects and the large payments to private banks that the state has had to assume because of student debt—much higher costs than it would have incurred if it had directly financed instruction for the same number of students—have been criticized. As Páez and Kremerman (2018) point out, with the creation of and increase in state-guaranteed credits even more of the Chilean higher education system was privatized and commercialized, establishing a lucrative business niche (promoted by the state) for the banks at the cost of indebtedness for low-income students and families.
During the 2000s, a series of international studies reported the inequality in the higher education model and the reduced state participation at this educational level (OECD, 2004; 2009). In light of this evidence, inequality and privatization of higher education in Chile began to appear in political and institutional debates. For example, during the first Bachelet administration (2006–2010), a presidential advisory council examined the state of higher education in an effort to detect the challenges present in this sector and propose possible reforms. However, it was actually the massive mobilizations of 2011 that finally forced the effects of the neoliberalization of higher education onto the public agenda (Cabalín, 2014; Torres, 2012). To some extent, the need to strengthen free quality public education entered the public debate as a social demand backed by reports from international organizations (OECD, 2004; 2009). The fact that higher education was more expensive in Chile than in most comparable countries “put a large and excessive burden on students and their families” (OECD, 2009: 17). In terms of the relation between public and private expenditures, university degree programs in Chile were among the most expensive in the world, even exceeding costs in countries such as the United States, England, and Japan. This was because of the low level of support provided by the state to the institutions, with families financing most of the tertiary education system (see Figure 2).
Ratio of private and public expenditures in higher education, 2010–2014 (data from Ministerio de Educación, 2017).
Furthermore, in the face of high levels of student debt, one of the principal public debates produced by the demonstrations was about putting an end to the private sector’s profiting from higher education. While the law defines universities as nonprofit institutions (which must reinvest their earnings in improvement of their infrastructure or services), the enormous interest that economic groups, family proprietors, and even transnational consortia showed in participating in this university system was striking (Mönckeberg, 2013). Taking advantage of the scant regulation and monitoring by the state and using various accounting and legal strategies, some university owners generated millions in profits for decades, making education one of post-Pinochet Chile’s most profitable businesses (Mönckeberg, 2007).
Inequality of Access to Higher Education as an Effect of Neoliberal Education
The inequality of access to higher education is an important indicator of the effects of the neoliberalization of education in Chile. The decision by Concertación governments to affirm neoliberal principles in grade school education produced significant inequalities in educational development and access to university education. A student in the middle-to-low- or low-income quintile has greater difficulty entering a select, high-prestige university than a student in a higher-income quintile (OECD, 2009; Espinoza and González, 2013).
As reported by García-Huidobro (2007), since 1990 schools have gradually been divided into groups according to the family’s ability to pay. The municipalization of public schools begun in the 1980s placed municipalities in charge of the administration of the elementary and secondary schools and the hiring and firing of teachers (Núñez, 1991; Aedo-Richmond, 2000). In a country where the majority of municipalities have limited budgets, this made it hard to think about ensuring educational quality, and the main result was the socioeconomic segregation of schools. The municipal public schools, which do not charge or discriminate in enrollment, are concentrated in low-income sectors. Private schools subsidized by the state focus on middle-income families, and the mostly high-cost private schools are concentrated in sectors where high-income groups reside (García-Huidobro, 2007). In cases such as the city of Santiago, this segregation can even be seen in geographic terms, with academic performance being tied to students’ townships of residence. Public institutions are concentrated in the lower-income townships and display lower academic performance. This has led some to speak of an apartheid or ghettoization of public education (García-Huidobro, 2007).
Legitimization of the system of public subsidies for private facilities has created a sustained increase in this type of institution, given its economic benefits for private administrators. As an example, at the end of the period 2000–2010, under the governments of presidents Lagos and Bachelet, private establishments subsidized by the state were in the majority and contained the largest number of students enrolled nationally (Figures 3 and 4) as a result of the constant reduction in the number of public institutions.
Number of schools according to type of administration (municipal, subsidized private, unsubsidized private), 2003–2011 (data from Ministerio de Educación, 2012).
Numbers of school enrollments by type of administration (municipal, subsidized private, unsubsidized private), 2003–2011 (data from Ministerio de Educación, 2012).
The evidence demonstrates that the educational model in Chile produces inequality in possibilities for access to and success in higher education, especially in universities, according to the student’s socioeconomic level and the type of establishment (private or public) that he or she attended (OECD, 2009). On the one hand, of the total number of students enrolled in the first year of university, only one-fourth had studied in public schools; the majority came from private secondary schools subsidized by the state (Figure 5). On the other hand, lower-income students who manage to gain access to university education make up the majority in the nonselect universities assessed as those with the lowest level of academic rigor (Espinoza and González, 2013).
Percentage of first-year university registration by type of secondary school (municipal, subsidized private, unsubsidized private, other), 2010–2014 (SIES, 2014).
The Dispute over the Neoliberalization of Education
At the start of the first Bachelet administration, inequality produced by free-market education was a central issue in the public debate. During the months of April, May, and June 2006, tens of thousands of secondary school students carried out a massive national mobilization questioning the educational policies of the Concertación governments and the education law inherited from the dictatorship. This movement, dubbed the “Penguins’ Revolution” for the type of school uniform worn by the students, paralyzed practically 70 percent of secondary school facilities, becoming the most significant social movement of the Concertación administrations (Ruiz, 2012). The students questioned the foundations of the Chilean model of free-market education, calling for the repeal of the dictatorship’s education law and an end to the municipalization of schools (considered a replicator of social and educational inequalities) and state subsidies for private education—the neoliberal educational principles legitimized by the Concertación governments—and for an extension of the school day (Torres, 2014). The impact of the educational policy of these administrations was seriously challenged. The unexpected increase in educational inequality was forced onto the political agenda of the newly elected president. To contend with this, government authorities channeled the student mobilizations toward the institutionalization of their demands through the creation of the above-mentioned advisory council. Drawing on the council’s work, Bachelet proposed a new education law that was rejected by the right in Congress, which defended the neoliberal education model.
In light of the limited opportunity for participation by students, negotiations between the government and the right-wing parties took on a leading role in the debate on education in 2007 and 2008. In the congressional discussion, negotiations between party leaders prevailed over the proposals of experts in education and students’ demands (Burton, 2012). Following the right’s rejection of the legal initiatives proposed by the Concertación, the Bachelet administration relinquished the idea of transforming the educational model with the goal of achieving a “national accord on education” with parties on the right. More than about a real possibility of putting an end to neoliberal principles in education, this agreement attempted to obtain a political victory vis-à-vis the 2009 presidential elections.
The approval of the General Education Law at the end of 2009 became part of the initiatives by which the political authorities attempted to respond to student demands. However, it was a process that the student movement explicitly distrusted. According to the students, these measures did not address their main criticisms of the educational model (Burton, 2012; Kubal and Fisher, 2016). As a result, in 2011 a new mobilization of university and secondary students demanded greater participation of the state in the educational system and an end to private institutions’ profiting from education.
For the Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile (Confederation of Chilean Students—CONFECH), the organization that represented the majority of the university student federations, the end of the Concertación administrations and the election of the first right-wing president since the end of the dictatorship provided a political opportunity to place the education issue on the public agenda (Grugel and Nem Singh, 2015; Torres, 2012; Torres and Sánchez, 2019). In 2011, the same generation of students that had participated in the 2006 Penguins’ Revolution once again expressed its discontent with the post-Pinochet educational model, and it did so through one of the largest mobilizations the country has ever experienced.
Over more than six months, strikes in the majority of universities, marches in various cities in which hundreds of thousands of people participated, the takeover of dozens of educational facilities, and the support of most of the population—more than 75 percent, according to polls (Adimark, 2011)—forced the movement’s demands into the public debate. Although this movement’s set of demands was extensive, it can be summarized as follows: (1) greater participation of the state in the educational system, guaranteeing education as a social right for the entire population, and increased public financing of education, including a free university system; (2) an end to the generation of profits for the owners and administrators of private educational institutions, a situation that placed education closer to a business than to a social right; and (3) an end to the system’s overindebtedness and to the poor quality of institutions despite their high costs (CONFECH, 2011a; 2011b).
Student demonstrations in 2011 exposed the ideological debate revolving around Chilean education (Cabalín, 2014; Torres, 2012). Despite the fact that during the mobilizations the government’s technical-liberal discourse was outweighed by the evidence of inequality and commercialization of the Chilean educational system, the authorities did not yield to student and social pressure. Negotiations between student leaders and the authorities were clearly hindered by the clash of values and ideas. President Piñera himself stated that in his view education was “a consumer good” and that in negotiations with the students two positions were apparent: the “state-run education” 4 demanded by students and the “society-run education” (the freedom of families to choose among different types of establishments, private or public) proposed by the right-wing government. As for CONFECH, in a letter presented to President Piñera on August 23, 2011, we see the students’ assessment of the effects of neoliberalization on the higher educational model: “Today new educational institutions have arisen that utilize the dreams of thousands of Chilean families as a means to obtain profits. This concept of education as a consumer good has generated false expectations in the students, who, deceived by institutions that advertise quality education, have seen their only hope of fully developing their capabilities dashed” (CONFECH, 2011b).
Toward the end of 2011, opinion polls showed the fervent rejection of the way in which the government had handled the mobilizations. In the face of several months of mobilization and a period of unsuccessful negotiations, some of the students called for radicalizing the movement. The political class, alerted by the level of discontent present in the population, turned to Congress as a way of imposing a solution on the students and citizenry. Parties in opposition to the right-wing government steered the students’ demands into the 2012 budgetary arena as a response to the mobilizations. The congressional debate responded primarily with an increase in public expenditures for education in 2012, but neither the students nor the majority of the population were satisfied with this measure. It was interpreted as a means of ending the year of mobilizations with some results for the movement but a far cry from the demand for free, quality public education (Kubal and Fisher, 2016; Torres and Sánchez, 2019).
The 2011 student movement initiated a series of political and educational changes in Chile. On the one hand, the parties that made up the Concertación joined with the Communist Party to create a new coalition, the Nueva Mayoría (New Majority). This alliance attempted to take up many of the claims presented by the 2011 mobilization and lay the groundwork for a second Bachelet term. On the other, various groupings in the student movement organized into new political forces that attained congressional representation in 2013, 5 among them Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution—RD) and Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left—IA), and created a legislative agenda (Kubal and Fisher, 2016; Gaudichaud, 2014).
Bachelet and the Nueva Mayoría won the 2013 presidential election with more than 62 percent of the vote. The president’s second term (2014–2018) was presented to the citizenry as a project to move ahead with the reforms demanded for years by the social mobilization: free university education, a process of citizen consultation to change the constitution inherited from the dictatorship, the end of the binominal system of parliamentary election, and a tax reform focused on improvements in income distribution, categorized by some authors as the largest “refoundational” political proposal since the return to democracy in 1990 (Garretón, 2016). Nevertheless, for other more critical analysts, such as Gaudichaud (2015: 95), “the ambiguities contained in the program, such as the 20-year record of the Concertación, fostered doubts about the depth of the intended reforms.”
In fact, the first years of the second Bachelet administration were marked by a significant political crisis. 6 The political opposition on the right waged an aggressive campaign in the press and opinion polls 7 against the principal reforms proposed, accusing the president of doing politics “according to the dictates of the street” and weakening the power of government communications (Gerber, 2016). This situation, added to internal conflicts in Nueva Mayoría —mainly differences between the Partido Comunista and the Partido Demócrata Cristiano— reduced the transformative nature of the reforms proposed by the Bachelet administration, which became a proposal to reestablish the coalition as a project that continued to negotiate with the principles of the post-Pinochet model in order to advance in its implementation (Gaudichaud, 2015).
The education sector was a priority for the Bachelet government, which had based a large part of its campaign on free university education and on the implementation of an educational reform that, according to its administration, would change free-market education (Kubal and Fisher, 2016). The president herself pointed to 2016 in presenting her reforms: “We cannot expect the problems to be resolved solely by the market, because education is not a consumer good that can be managed as a mere business.” Concretely, Bachelet’s second term proposed a series of policies at the university and grade school levels highlighting, in addition to her proposed free university, laws to end profit making in educational institutions that received public financing, the elimination of all forms of discrimination against primary or secondary school students, and the end of municipal administration of public schools. For higher education, the proposals were free university education, quality education in all institutions, equity and inclusion, relevance of instruction, and high-level technical-professional training. At the primary and secondary school levels, the proposals were an end to the selection of students, free facilities, and an increase in resources for private, nonprofit secondary schools, demunicipalization of secondary schools, strengthening of public education, and citizen training.
As to whether this reform represented a change in the principles of market education, the end of the Bachelet administration in March 2018 left a contradictory impression. On one hand, it could not be characterized as a refoundational project or a structural change in the neoliberal educational model. On the other, there was an attempt to increase the state’s ability to monitor and regulate, reducing the power of the market in the educational system. However, the reform continued to be based on the economistic and technocratic criteria inherent in post-Pinochet public management, proposing what some have described as a second-generation educational neoliberalism (Fleet, Leihy, and Salazar, 2020).
First of all, free university education, Bachelet’s main proposal, was under way in 2016. While it has allowed more than 250,000 young people, 30 percent of higher education students, to study free of charge, its implementation has once again been based on a logic of subsidies financed by the state. Despite the significant advance that this subsidy means for democratizing access to higher education, free higher education is not conceived as a social right that the state must guarantee to all students irrespective of their socioeconomic level. It is a benefit that the state grants to students in the 60 percent of the population classified as low-income and depends on a budget that must be negotiated with Congress every year. In addition, free education, as a subsidy system, is centered on private education, since the majority of the students benefited are studying in these institutions. Meanwhile, the state universities and the principal student federations have denounced the lack of a real policy for strengthening public university education (Kubal and Fisher, 2016).
Secondly, despite the fact that the reform managed to approve laws of great importance to the democratization of education such as those that put an end to private sector profits in education, in the selection of students by schools and the municipal administration of public schools many of the principles of market education continue (Fleet, Leihy, and Salazar, 2020). Examples are the competition among public and private facilities to attract students and state subsidies to private institutions. In addition, some writers indicate that this educational reform was decided through political negotiations that did not include education actors or mobilized students (Kubal and Fisher, 2016; Gaudichaud, 2015).
Bachelet’s educational reform proposal revealed an ideological confrontation between the defenders of the neoliberal principles that have regulated the educational system and the proposals for transforming market education. Although the right-wing sectors were unable to prevent the approval of laws such as those that put an end to profit in education and increased the state’s ability to regulate, the Bachelet administration overlooked the possibility of structural changes—all of this in a social context marked by a profound crisis of citizen confidence in the political authorities and deep discontent and frustration over the persistence of and even an increase in inequalities produced by the model, a latent social distress that would erupt in the streets in the October 2019 social upheaval during Piñera’s second term.
Final Reflections: The End of the Post-Pinochet Educational Project in Sight?
As we have seen, since the 2000s the social demand for a state that ensures equity and quality in its educational model has been one of the primary focal points of political conflict in post-Pinochet Chile. Reflecting on the demands of the student mobilizations, we discern that the Chilean educational model was based on neoliberal principles, without an open dialogue with the citizenry. The student mobilizations and the social support they have received show that a significant portion of the general public wishes to create and launch that discussion.
From the time that the effects of free-market education became a social and political problem, the students’ demands went beyond the limits of the educational sector itself to become a debate on the structural inequalities produced by the post-Pinochet neoliberal model—a model that for decades had managed the major social rights according to market principles. This public questioning of the model became evident with Piñera’s return to the presidency (2018–2022). In fact, in October 2019, the discontent over the politico-corporate discourse of the second right-wing administration accumulated over decades exploded, sparking the largest social protests in Chile’s recent history. For months, the public organized as a political actor demanding a definitive rejection of the “tempered neoliberalism” applied in post-Pinochet Chile. Thus, the historic demonstrations throughout the country revealed the majority of the population’s profound desire for social transformation.
Many of the social demands formulated throughout the October 2019 mobilizations are the result of the cycle of student mobilizations conducted since the 2006 secondary school students’ protests. Thus the student movement’s criticism of the educational and social model paved the way for exposing the profound crisis of the post-Pinochet political project: the contradiction between acknowledging social rights and legitimizing the neoliberal framework that regulated the state’s actions. The October 2019 social upheaval signaled the end of the political foundation of the constitution inherited from the dictatorship. The current constitutional process is marked by challenges and opportunities related to the real possibilities for transformation of the post-Pinochet model. In the specific case of education, one question is whether the actors representing the demand to transform the state’s role in education are participating in the decision-making bodies for the new constitution and the extent to which the new constitution will include the demands placed in the public debate by the student mobilizations for more than a decade. These points have great significance, since the composition and evolution of the constitutional debate will legitimize the process in the public eye, presenting itself as an opportunity to correct, to some degree, the citizenry’s low level of confidence in the possibilities for transformation by means of the political system. The drafting of a new constitution is a tremendous opportunity to translate an entire cycle of mobilization and student participation in public affairs into a political and legislative event—a moment to define and build, acknowledging education as part of the social rights that the state should ensure.
Footnotes
Notes
Rodrigo Torres is a professor and researcher at the Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales y Juventud of the Universidad Católica Silva Henríquez. This article was written as part of Fondecyt Project no. 3170570, funded by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico–Comisión Nacional de Investigación Cientifíca y Tecnológica (CONICYT). Victoria Furio is a translator and conference interpreter located in Yonkers, NY.