Unmaking the market: exploring the Chilean challenges to de-privatise the educational system

Abstract

The Chilean educational system is widely known as one of the most marketized systems globally. However, new political dynamics have emerged, challenging the extent to which education has been privatised and set in train what we might call the ‘unmaking of the market’. Across the literature, there are numerous accounts on making markets. However, what does ‘unmaking’ the market look like as a project, process, and set of outcomes, especially in a context where markets as a mode of coordination of social life more generally, and education as a sector in particular, have become common sense? This paper draws from a larger study on the making of the education market in Chile over a forty-year period. Focusing on the latest Bachelet's reforms (2014–2018), which aim to roll back privatisation and put into place the strengthening of public education, undoing the institutionalisation and legitimation of market-making mechanisms, and the materialisation of the market through its interiorisation in education actors. Here I show the emergence of a new discourse: a progressive dispute of the public(in)education. Chile finds itself in an interregnum; the old is potentially dying, but a new social order is yet to be born to stabilise a new epistemic moment.