At the turn of the 21st century, the Argentine economy entered a downward spiral that climaxed in December 2001-January 2002 with the onset of a long-term and unprecedentedly large-scale financial collapse. As the consequence of an overzealous implementation of neoliberal economic policies undertaken during the 1990s, this crisis had devastating effects on Argentine citizens and society. Unemployment, inflation, inequality, crime, insecurity, instability and discontent all skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. Periodic protests also emerged across the country as citizens from diverse walks of life merged to voice their grievances and frustrations toward political authorities and elites who they felt were both responsible for the crisis and largely unable to deal with it.
Among the myriad sectors devastated by the massive economic crisis was the Argentine public education system. Once upon a time, Argentina had built an exemplary model of inclusive universal public schooling characterized by some of the highest levels of educational opportunity and achievement in Latin America. Unfortunately, under pressure from powerful transnational actors such as the IMF and World Bank, over the course of the 1990s the Argentine educational system was quickly seized by a wave of widespread marketization and privatization initiatives. As the logic of educational governance shifted to promoting and subsidizing private schools, a weakening of political commitment and shrinking revenues led to a profound deterioration of public school facilities.
In 2014, I received a multi-year grant from the Spencer Foundation (Chicago, U.S.A.) to study how people have worked to both navigate and transcend the educational crisis in Argentina by engaging in grassroots processes of collective action and mobilization. More specifically, I have been looking into the struggles, strategies and successes of a community-based schooling movement that emerged in the urban megalopolis of Buenos Aires during the early 2000s. As a sociologist, I am especially interested in understanding how people exert their agency in times of macro-structural flux and uncertainty. During fall semester 2015, I orchestrated a PEERS project at UCM centered on this project, and I have been very fortunate to work with two very bright and motivated students: Elisa Garrote Soto and Sergio Calderón-Harker. Their insights have been invaluable in shaping my thoughts on what has turned out to be a very complex and utterly compelling sociological topic.
My project tells the story of how a diverse but unified network of educators, parents and activists from various districts of Buenos Aires responded to a situation of profound crisis by working to develop an alternative system of community-based schools, usually referred to in Argentina as escuelas de gestión social or escuelas cooperativas. Although there is no single universal model for this kind of school in Argentina, they generally emphasize ‘progressive’ principles of social justice, autonomy and democratization. While these kinds of schools have existed in various forms in Argentina for several decades, they experienced notable growth in the years following a massive politico-economic crisis in 2001 and subsequent national restructuring of education in 2007. Representing less than one per cent of students in Buenos Aires, such numbers may not seem to be very monumental. Nonetheless, from a sociological perspective the rise of community-based schools is representative of some meaningful changes in the relationship between school, state and society in Argentina. More specifically, it is constitutive of a break with the past and a re-imagining of the future.
Drawing on a qualitative analysis of interviews, organizational texts, state-level policy documents, and media reports, I argue that the climaxing of a large-scale politico-economic crisis at the end of 2001 created an enabling structure of opportunity that facilitated the development of community-based schooling in at least two ways. On the one hand, the crisis created the socio-cultural conditions for a group of previously disconnected actors to build empowering forms of solidarity around shared sets of experiences, grievances and interests within the education system. At the core of these solidarity-building practices was a profound disdain and critique of the neoliberal approaches to educational policy-making which had dominated Argentina since the late 1980s. In this regard, people sought to build new kinds of educational spaces and projects whereby progressive values of democratization, cooperativism and social justice could be brought to life. On the other hand, the crisis generated a major ideological rupture in the Argentine political system that in turn created an opportunity for grassroots actors to introduce new kinds of curricular and pedagogical projects into the educational system. In short, during the aftermath of the crisis of 2001, many of the dominant neoliberal ideologies and practices from the past lost their legitimacy, thus opening up concrete possibilities for progressive actors to insert their agendas into the arena of educational governance and policy-making. This ‘success’ is evidenced by formal state-level recognition of community-based schools in a reform of the national education system undertaken by the government of Nestór Kirchner in 2007.
Under situations of macro-structural crisis, people often experience uncertainty, frustration, anxiety and despair. Yet, as illustrated by the rise of the community-based schooling movement in Argentina, by engaging in organized and enduring forms of purposeful collective action, people can and do find ways to transcend such traumatizing and disorienting moments. Moreover, through solidaristic collaboration and commitment to collective action, people can also find ways to turn crises into opportunities.
Dr. Kai Heidemann
The Bell 