MODERNITY AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY IN THE 1990s: LIMITS AND TENSIONS FOR DEMOCRATIC MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The social and political processes in Latin America are being developing whithin a conflictive frame of contradictory tendencies. One of them is the modernization understood a rationalization process of a way of capitalist accumulation. The other tendency is maintained by the modernity understood as a normative process that set its grounds in “the confidence -inspired in the science- in an infinite progress of the knowledge and an infinite social and moral improvement” (Habermas, J.; 1987). In Argentina, in the 1990s, outstanding transformations were developed in the structural level of the system which acted as a process of “modernization without modernity”. These transformations operated widening the breach between the grade of social differentiation and the possible ways of interaction. The discussion about the scopes of the impact generated by those transformations is still opened. The social policy, in broad terms, has contributed to material and symbolic resources to obtain minimal supports of legitimacy that conferred norms of governability to the system in the process of change of its identitary patterns. In the province of Río Negro the application of the convertibility plan, since 1991, modified drastically the development conditions of the welfare layouts that, in a populist way, hid their own limits. The final result was manifested in structural changes with fiscal, changes with fiscal administrative, organizational and coverages rationalization, specially in the state educative service. With this aim, the participation, one of the categories to which the decisional space of the system appealed to carry out the regulative strategy of the decentralization, took different forms. The concept of participation deeply rooted in the political collective provincial imaginary, acted as a way of access to “the public” that determines the new directions. Therefore, it is important to know: ¿to what extent do enough interests still exist -related to qualifications to orientate a process of political decisions- that lead to note benefits in the participation?, ¿what potential possibilities  does it maintain for the re-creation of the structure of political rules? From these principles we deal with the analysis of a state public policy in Río Negro in order to re-orientate the terms of management of the schools coming under the Consejo Provincial de Educación of Río Negro province, legitimated in the expansion of social participation processes. This, specifically, has contributed to the configuration, organization and development of “Consejos Institucionales” -Institutional Councils-. This paper sustains the hypothesis that what made possible a new way of anticipating the characterization of the order and sense of the crisis and of naming the actors. Along these lines, it is upheld that the way in which participation and the decentralization were implemented in the Institutional Councils levels, acted weakening the school organizative principles that linking it to “the public” –and the associated political competence-. This way allowed the reinforcement of centralist and disciplinary proposals of the neoliberalism.