The diffuse meaning of “the public” in a Chilean school: A case study

Abstract

This article presents the results of case study of a public school in Chile. The study analyzes the diffuse meaning of “the public” in an educational center that reproduces a confessional culture attached to the Catholic religion. The identity stamp of the studied educational project arises historically from the private-confessional Catholic world; however, when entering and transferring to the public administration, the ideological practices that sustain it are maintained. This discussion of the meaning of the public in education is based on tensions that emerge from a confessional normative ideology as a pre-established order of “being”, under the logic of the private world. Analytical categories in the results are linked to: 1) Christian-Catholic school culture; 2) student pseudo-participation in an adult-centrist culture; and, 3) relational classism as a critique of inclusion, evidencing contexts of supervised democracy and exclusion of diversity and difference, which blur the ethical political support of democratic coexistence between the common and the public.