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