Divergent discourses? Crossroads on education policy and globalization. The cases of Chile and Venezuela

Abstract

Latin American countries have been part of the so-called peripheral capitalisms in the context of the globalization of the world-system, this positioning has had a strong impact on the development of the educational sector, and its respective implications for national development, conditioned by exclusion mechanisms that operates at different levels. In the case of Chile, this has been carried out through mechanisms intrinsic to its educational reforms, coherent with a neoliberal discourse that conceive education as a source of reproduction of its enormous social inequality, trend that has been tried to revert in the last decade through public policies oriented to the regulation of the educational system. In the case of Venezuela, its orientation as a Teacher-State with a high counter-hegemonic ideological component, its oriented towards a model of social transformation under a "revolutionary" and heterodox political project in relation to global trends, where its discursive and politics transformation generates new mechanisms of social conflict, despite the existence of a public educational discourse of a high social vocation, which is conditioned by isolation and limited rights at different levels. Both models have been object of social questioning, having to reformulate some of their defining features during the recent years. The question that arises from the analysis will be: What kind of convergences can be identified in educational policies between both countries, that have faced the process of economic globalization in a completely different way?