La escuela neoliberal en la Comunidad de Madrid. Estrategias y prácticas políticas, 2003-2015.

• Main Author: Elías Ramírez Aísa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) 2016-03-01
• Series: Historia y Memoria de la Educación
• Subjects: privatización; neoliberalismo; neoconservadurismo; autonomía; excelencia; mercado
• Online Access: http://revistas.uned.es/index.php/HMe/article/view/14990

<p>The politics of education can be analyzed from two points of view: as a<br />structure, one that affects institutions and the rules that regulate them, and as<br />a process one that focuses on the behaviour of those involved and on outcomes.<br />This article deals with the politics of education as seen in outcomes, this being<br />the essential core of the policies implemented in the field of education by the<br />Partido Popular in Madrid. As we will see, the measures undertaken make this<br />region a genuine laboratory of neoliberal and neoconservative educational<br />practices.<br />We will observe how we are facing coherent educational practices, guided<br />predominantly by the neoliberal ideology: an instrumental design of<br />administrative organization in keeping with the government’s ideology and<br />political orientation; an increasing and shameless process of privatization of<br />educational opportunities; the primacy of school choice on the families’ part<br />which, together with the defense and promotion of the schools’ autonomy,<br />inevitably leads to the triumph of competition within the educational market,<br />thus completing the link between the sum of the educational goods and the<br />satisfaction of the family desires; a<br />differentiated curriculum and a proposed<br />evaluation of the subjects. Under the guise of traditional education, this<br />endorsement of a culture of effort, talent and individual merit are meant to come<br />together under the equivocal concept of excellence. This approach, which, takes<br />a suspicious view of laicism, also takes a posture clearly favouring conservative<br />groups and even religious institutions, all intent on creating educational centres<br />that will vehemently defend the liberal and spiritual ideologies and the political<br />system they support.</p>