Building schools and futures with utopian social movements in Buenos Aires

• Autores: Meghan Krausch
• Localización: Global movements, national grievances: mobilizing for "real democracy" and social justice / Benjamín Tejerina Montaña (ed. lit.), Ignacia Perugorría (ed. lit.), 2012, ISBN 978-84-9860-768-0, págs. 274-292
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro
• Resumen

  • In December 2001, after more than a decade of neoliberal governance, Argentina was in a severe political, economic and social crisis. The extreme levels of poverty and unemployment led some desperately frustrated Argentines to organize themselves into movements of unemployed workers (MTDs) while others recovered their former workplaces. Buenos Aires has continued to be the site of intense theorizing, debate, and experimentation in forms of radical democracy that are fundamentally utopian in origin.

    These movements are utopian in the sense that they bring their radical vision of the future into the present through attempted immediate transformation of both material conditions and social relationships. The key aspects of this utopian future/present are consensus-based decision making and leaderless institutional structures. This paper examines the experience of one such experiment, an MTD-run adult education program known as a people’s high school (bachillerato popular). The school—part of a larger trend among MTDs—is run collectively by teachers and students working together to construct popular education that is more responsive to the needs of the community it serves. This paper draws on 11 months of participant observation and interviews to examine how the school’s utopian goals affect teachers, students, and the larger society. I argue that as a utopian social movement, the school already is social change.