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The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile

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The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education

Abstract

This chapter reviews citizenship education in Chile as a national public policy vis-à-vis the international academic and political debates in the field. Chile’s citizenship education policy appears highly conditioned by successive paradigmatic experiments – progressive education (1930–1950), Christian democratic reformism (1964–70), socialist revolution (1970–73), and authoritarian and neoliberal (1973–90). Since 1990 civic education policy in Chile has tried to update to the international paradigm on citizenship education, conditioned in this attempt by a long transition to democracy and the recent appearance of a student social movement agitating for a shift away from neoliberal educational policies. As a result, Chile has partially adopted international standards in its citizenship education curricular guidelines, with some notable omissions such as the ideas of global citizenship and multiculturalism. Actors’ interests and preferences, as well as normative ideas and debates, are ubiquitous; therefore, no adversarial or deliberative approach by its own could explain citizenship education as a public policy. Instead, the analysis provided in this chapter applies an institutional perspective that integrates the adversarial and deliberative approaches into a long-term process that defines institutional development, historical legacies, and social and political context.

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Acknowledgment

This chapter is a result of a broader research initiative for which the author has received funding from the Chilean government through FONDECYT project No. 1171448. The author wishes to thank Dania Straughan and Nikolai Stieglitz for English editing and proofreading and Alejandra Marinovic and the editors of this handbook for extensive comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ciencia Política, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Rodrigo Mardones

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  1. Rodrigo Mardones
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Correspondence to Rodrigo Mardones .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Andrew Peterson

  2. University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Garth Stahl

  3. University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, SA, Australia

    Hannah Soong

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Mardones, R. (2020). The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile. In: Peterson, A., Stahl, G., Soong, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_35

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