Doing neoliberalism on the go. Creation and resignification of educational ideas in the Chilean dictatorship

Abstract

This paper proposes a legal, political and historical reconstruction of the implementation of school policies during the civil-military dictatorship (1973-1990), building a staged organization scheme that complexes the divisions exposed by other analyzes of the period. We reject the idea that before 1979 inactivity and confusion dominated, demonstrating that the main neoliberal components were early delineated. For this, we examine legal sources and deliberative documents such as the “actas” of the “Junta de Gobierno”, press, and interviews with specialists and key actors of the period. We propose a procedural reading that evidences its creative, contingent and full of disputes character. More than a mechanical import of neoliberal ideas, the dictatorship carried out a work of resignification and eidetic creation. We believe that this reading favors the understanding of the market logic that operates in the school system nowadays and its possibilities of transformation.