In the Company of Others: Tracing Historic Public/Private Enclosures through Education in Peru

• In Event: Continuities & Disruptions: Exploring Historical Legacies in Latin American Education Today

Proposal

The critical literature on the privatisation of education has advanced nuanced understandings of this phenomenon, stressing its links with public education, as well as the multiple ‘grey areas’ in which public-private distinctions are unclear, such as the case of PPPs. In that sense, there is an argument against the theoretical binary between public and private education in contemporary times. Moreover, with the rise of corporations, financialisation, venture capitalism and ed-tech in education, scholars have also advanced a conceptual distinction within privatisation that includes commercialisation and marketization.

While these conceptualisations are extremely useful to account for the ways in which private arrangements occur within the public sector and the different manifestations of privatisation, most of these authors refer specifically to forms of privatisation that are linked to market and for-profit institutions. Following that, they account for the growth of this phenomenon in the context of global neoliberalism. However, in the case of postcolonial contexts such as Latin America, privatisation has also worked as a form of ‘enclosure’ (Federicci 2014; Harvey, 2007; Linebaugh, 2014) of social bonds, bodies and ways of seeing. Following authors that argue for the intersection between privatisation, coloniality, and state formation such as Edwards et al. (2023), I propose to understand the current configuration of the private education system by looking at its past patterns and lineages in history. This may shed light on how the neoliberal project builds on and conflicts with previous forms of local social structures and exclusions (Ong 2006).

This paper traces the different manifestations of privatisation of education in the city of Lima, Perú in specific conjuntural moments (Hall 2010) throughout history, its ebbs and flows with public education, and their links to demographic changes, immigration, educational expansion and political, social and cultural developments. Specifically, I focus on the changing narratives over ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ in education, and who do they include or exclude. To do so, I analyse archival documents, including policy, media articles and debates. Even though Peruvian scholars have examined private education in different historical periods, specifically in the last thirty years, there is currently no comprehensive account that connects these different forms of privatisation - or enclosures - over time.

Author

• María Fernanda Rodríguez, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge