The Fragility of the School-in-Pandemic in Chile

Abstract

This chapter examines how Chilean education was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Like all school systems worldwide, Chilean education was strongly impacted, with schools closing for nearly the entire academic year, which necessitated an improvised “distance education.” This new system faced enormous difficulties, especially in rural sectors and for families that lacked sufficient resources in their homes, which in the case of Chile represent a significant portion of the population. Based on secondary sources and a study conducted by the authors, this chapter begins by describing the fundamental characteristics of Chilean education before continuing with an overview of the principal actions undertaken by public authorities to confront the pandemic in the educational sphere; we then present the (scant) information available on how the suspension of in-person classes affected different school actors and summarize the basic findings of our own study on this topic, whose focus is educational experiences at home. The chapter concludes with some reflections of a more general nature that seek to situate the educational debate triggered by the pandemic in a broader context, concerning the future evolution of the education system.