The educational attention of the population in Argentina during the last decades: Between the illusory distribution, the efficient modernization and the discourses of the right to education

Abstract

The paper centers on issues around the educational attention of the population through time in Argentina alongside the interpretation of the role of the State and the orientation of the public policies. The paper recognizes education as a social right of the population, including access to all educational levels from initial to university. First, the analysis supports the idea of a chronicity and worsening of educational inequality since the changes in the so-called welfare or social State that sustained the free and equal distribution of education as a discourse of citizen integration until the advent of a neoliberal policy and efficient modernization in the 1990s that continues as a policy-administrative matrix. The second part addresses the research findings concerning problems of benefited and excluded population from education in recent decades. The results refer to provincial differences, to estimations of the educational social debt with the infantile, adolescent and adult populations, and with limitations in implementing programs of inclusion throughout local territories, a spatial area that expresses what is possible for school and real actors.