Who Deserves the Award?: Criteria and Moral Frameworks in the Awarding of School Recognitions in Chile

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 15. International Schooling and Outcomes

Abstract

This article presents a critical qualitative study of the moral criteria underlying the allocation and awarding of school prizes in Chilean schools. Based on interviews with parents, teachers, and students, we question how merit and deservingness operate in practice. The main objective was to analyse the ways in which award criteria are agreed upon and forms of distinction for what is defined as an “exemplary student” are legitimised. The results show that awards are based on a moral infrastructure centred on competition. Awards and ceremonies operate as symbolic acts that communicate institutional ideas, generating ambivalence between motivation and exclusion.

While grounded in the Chilean case, this study speaks to broader debates on educational inequality. Chile represents a paradigmatic case of educational privatization, initiated under dictatorship and consolidated through market-oriented reforms that produced one of the most stratified school systems worldwide. In this context, school awards not only motivate students but also reproduce logics of competitiveness and exclusion that mirror structural inequalities. For an international audience, and particularly for U.S. scholars concerned with stratification, meritocracy, and privatization in education, the Chilean case offers a critical lens to interrogate how moral and affective dimensions of recognition contribute to the reproduction of inequality. We highlight the need to question educational awards as moral infrastructures that sustain broader regimes of competition and stratification across diverse educational systems.

Authors

• Camila Moyano-Davila, Universidad de Chile

• Ismael Tabilo, Universidad Finis Terrae and Universidad Alberto Hurtado

• Amaro Correa, SUMMA research laboratory in Chile