The Movement for the Right to Education in Paraguay: Student Actors and Disputes over Youth Subjectivities in a Society of Inequality

Abstract

During the last years of the Stroessner authoritarian regime, the right to education has been a collective demand undertaken by civil society organizations, local grassroots communities, teachers’ unions and student movements, as well as urban trade union organizations and rural peasant organizations, all of which identified education not only as a right whose access and exercise was undermined by social inequalities, but also as a public good threatened by public policy by proposing it more as a “service” intended for “users”. This opposition to education as a commodity is important in a society that has historically been based on social and political clientelism. Faced with an education system progressively infiltrated by ideological principles to turn education into a product, the movement for the right to education emerged as a resistance to the commodification of this public good. This chapter examines the social conditions of the emergence of the new Paraguayan educational field, the tensions between the different social sectors and actors in defining the nature and aims of education, as well as the claims of the social movement for education—made up of students, teachers, unions, social and civil society organizations—to achieve free, quality public education.