Re-enchanting education: Bachilleratos Populares in Argentina as a commoning experience

Abstract

Bachilleratos Populares (henceforth BPs) are free and self-managed high schools by grassroots social organizations after the Argentine crisis of 2001 to provide an option for youth and adults to finish their secondary education as a response to the gap the neoliberal reform left in this educational modality during the 1990s. After some BPs received state recognition to issue degrees in 2007, their number increased rapidly to almost a hundred BPs by 2015. Based on a literature review, this article offers a work of a theoretical nature: it deploys the neo-Marxist approach to the commons as a theoretical-analytical framework through the experience of the BP movement. This approach denounces the processes of enclosure (commercialization and privatization) of shared material and immaterial resources while also promoting commoning practices as seeds that anticipate an anti-capitalist future in the present.