The constitutional debate on the right to education and its impact on citizens

Abstract

In the context of the constituent process taking place in Chile, this paper studies one of the main constitutional debates that has developed throughout the country’s history: The debate over the right to education. We analyse this debate between 1990 and 2016 to explore how elite discourse and citizens’ opinions regarding the right to education are related. We first propose a periodization of the discussions of the elite, determined by the irruption of the Chilean student movement in 2006 and 2011, and the gradual constitutionalisation of the debate. We then carry out a discourse analysis of the citizen dialogues, specifically the Encuentros Locales Autoconvocados (ELA), or Self-convened Local Meetings, developed within the framework of the constitutional process that took place in 2016. Finally, by comparing both discourses, we conclude that although there is receptivity to the ideas of the elites in the ELA discourses, they do not constitute a complete reflection of these ideas. This questions the notion that citizen discourses only reaffirm the discourses of the elite without contributing anything new.