The commercialization of higher education and the emergence of the student movement in Chile (2006/2011): impacts and challenges

Abstract

The objective of this text is to characterize minimally the dynamics of commercialization of Chilean education, from the period of the military dictatorship to the present day, in light of the most recent expressions of the student movement, which in two successive waves of organizations and protests, 2006 and 2011, managed to claim the need to rethink education as a universal and free right, thus generating a wide-ranging questioning of the type of neoliberal society conceived since the authoritarian period (1973-1989), but also shielded and perfected since later democratic governments. This reflection and exposition of conjunctures is carried out in the first place seeking to identify and map some relevant historical events, but at the same time, we allow ourselves a reflective exploration around two dimensions, that of gender and ethnicity, which seem to us still poorly understood and / or invisibilities in the political and social representation of this movement.