Summary of ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION: THE MERIT AND THE (RE) PRODUCTION OF THE INEQUALITY, by OPECH and CESCC

Hello everybody, today im going to talk you about an important article about an investigation of the educational system in Chile, called: ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION: THE MERIT AND THE (RE) PRODUCTION OF THE INEQUALITY, by OPECH and CESCC. First of all the article talk about how the enrollment in Chile has increased in the last decades.The problema is that this enrollment implies privatization of education, initiated into dictatorship and consolidated in the governments of the concerted of democracy parties. This caused a great inequity between persons who have enough Money to invest in education and who haven't. This happens in school and in the university. From the above is to be attempt to address this problem by attempting to question the meritocratic ideology.

For this attempt, they review some authors addressing the issue of education. The dominant theory in modern society is the liberal paradigm of equality of opportunity to compete that supports meritocracy. Meritocracy is defined by the authors as “a set of interconnected ideas that manages to successfully permeate cultural practices of individuals”. Authors think that in Chile meritocracy is reinforced with the objective of maintaining the social structure. This situation is found in the Chilean higher education system because there are structural barriers in college access  such as the University Selection Test (PSU ), high tariffs, senior high schools and the universities segmentation.

The authors conclude that it is necessary to move towards a system fair university Access without the meriticracy. What should happen is that the ability to access knowledge on different disciplines across the university are available to everyone . For this object, this study should be available to everyone, as this proposal for a new university will be built collectively. It is important for this object to ask about the kind of Education that we have and their role in society.

This is the link of the article http://www.opech.cl/inv/analisis/acceso.pdf

Happyness and psycology

Hello everybody, I will talk you about a phycologist who study the happiness: Dan Gilbert. He made a presentation about a cientific study of this topic called “The surprising science of happiness”. The presentation start with a speech about the frontal lobe, and his function wich is to be a experience simulator. Then, he make a game with the spectators, consisting in show to them two pictures about the future, a good one and a bad one. This game demonstrates the tendency that this simulator have to malfunction. He concludes then that happyness can be synthesized. This is a psycological defense system. Then he shows examples about people that despite having bad luck is happy.
He says that there are two different kinds of happyness, in his own words: “Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.”  Then he explain an experiment calling free choise. He repites the experiment with people who had lose them memory, and the results are the same. This means that the free choise is the enemy of the synthetic happiness.  Besides, he made an experiment at Harvard university wich a photography class, demostrating his hypotesis.
After this he concludes that the elections are pretentious
and we have the capacity in our brains to be happy.

I think that despite being a scientific conclusion, i’m not agree, because happiness is not only a psychological process. In this sense, the individual is determined by situations that surpass him as a subject, so that happiness is personal and social at the same time. This is why we should all make us part of our society and actively participate in its evolution.