The rise of the new right and the undermining of the commons in Argentine educational policies of the 21st century

Abstract

The paper presents research results on the trajectory of educational policies for the secondary level promoted by right-wing governments, focusing on the conceptions of inequalities that underpin the policy instruments through which they are operationalized. We start from the concern about the advance of these political forces in the last decade in Latin America, and we question the enabling political and social conditions of the orientations they advocate. Based on these questions, the article reconstructs the actors involved in these processes, the meanings and values through which they reorganize the educational political field, as well as the practices and devices through which they materialize new cultural bases of domination that, in their most extreme versions, question the very existence of social rights and compulsory schooling. Our hypothesis is that long-standing individualization dynamics have generated the conditions of possibility for these advances by crystallizing rules, procedures, and modes of public intervention that conveyed stigmatizing representations of the most vulnerable sectors and eroded the legitimacy of protective policies. We analyze the national and jurisdictional levels, considering the federal nature of the Argentine education government, and take as a case study the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) for being the area of consolidation of the right-wing forces that reached the presidency through electoral means.