Marchas y contramarchas. El derecho a la educación y las dinámicas de exclusión incluyente en América Latina (a sesenta años de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos)

Abstract

his article analyzes the complex process of consolidation that education as a basic human right has undergone since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) in 1948.
It claims that the huge progress achieved in the universalization of schooling (still not including the right to education) associated to a significant expansion of national education systems, has taken place in a context of increasing social inequality, which is articulated to an ever increasing and complex educative inequality that, together with lack of equity, is produced in school systems.
We analyze the fact that (despite the fact that there is not in the udhr a line of reasoning that allocates value to education given its capacity to generate wealth) is exactly this mindset the one that has prevailed. This creates a binomial of opposite goals, one related to a socializing and another to a privatizing conception of education: a market-wise oriented interpretation of educative assets that reduces the role of the Commonwealth, guarantor of the Right to Education, to subsidy allocation and ill-conceived assistance.
The text critically approaches the processes of «including exclusion» (the struggle for knowledge is always a struggle for power) as a dynamics that has characterized contemporary development in Latin American education.
Therefore, with a background of improvements and disimprovements that define the expansion of schooling and education rights that have been persistently denied to great portions of the population, different lines of analysis are suggested, in order to reflect on the challenges that can be seen on the horizon of regional educative policies.