Chilean Education: Governing through Market, Inclusion, and Security

Abstract

The chapter examines the Chilean education system as a terrain in which three governmental rationalities-market, inclusion, and security-intersect. It traces the neoliberal restructuring of education since the 1980s, organized around demand-side subsidies, standardized testing, and school choice, and the student mobilizations of 2006 and 2011 as forms of counter-conduct against market rationality. It analyzes school inclusion as a governmental rationality that, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, classifies and manages school populations while articulating with rather than displacing market logic. The chapter then examines the securitization of school space through punitive legislation, the Safe Classroom Act and the Protected Schools bill, as the local actualization of transnational zero-tolerance policies. Drawing on Foucauldian frameworks of governmentality and subjectivation, the central argument is that Chile constitutes a singular case for comparative governmentality analysis: it has assembled these three rationalities generating its own subjects, truths, and forms of inequality. The Chilean case is particularly significant for examining how heterogeneous and at times contradictory rationalities of government become condensed and materialized within a national education system, producing continuous reform without structural transformation.