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.
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Notes
- 1.
Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP), Alternativa Socialista, among the most outstanding.
- 2.
Protests in Asunción against the assassination of the then vice president of the Republic, Luis Argaña, which led to the removal of President Raul Cubas Grau, to inaugurate what was called the Government of National Unity.
- 3.
- 4.
This decision was not discussed among the organizations that decided to organize the protest, beyond their own disagreements in the negotiation and action planning process. This is demonstrated by the fact that, in 2016, ONE took part, with other organizations, in a new demonstration targeted at the MEC.
- 5.
As a matter of fact, the structural and institutional bases of these student demonstrations, which, a few months later, would unfold in the university sector through the #UNA-No Te Calles movement, are analyzed, by Ortiz (2016), in terms of social structure transformation processes, specifically about social classes.
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I would like to acknowledge and thank Sergio Rojas for his collaboration in the completion of this work.
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Ortiz, L. (2023). The Movement for the Right to Education in Paraguay: Student Actors and Disputes over Youth Subjectivities in a Society of Inequality. In: Levy, C., Elgert, L., L'Heureux, V. (eds) Social Movements and the Struggles for Rights, Justice and Democracy in Paraguay. Social Movements and Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25883-1_10
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