The role of education on social mobility in mexico and chile
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[1] Graduate School, UPAEP
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- Localización: Perspectivas sociales = Social Perspectives, ISSN-e 2007-9265, Vol. 16, Nº. 1, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Perspectivas Sociales), págs. 53-71
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Education and its role in social stratification has been the focus of attention for a number of decades now. However, little is known as to what takes place in Latin America. The supposed point of departure to study education and its role in social stratification is that education should act to break the inertias between origins and destinies. This article addresses the question whether education is a factor that contributes to break the cycle of persistent inequality in Mexico, and also if this is a form to evaluate the achievements of the social contract that came out of the Mexican Revolution, which this year, 2010, celebrates its century of existence. This is so because one of the main objectives of the revolution was to cut down the privileges of the dominant class, and along with it, the inter-generational transmission of wealth that perpetuates inequality. Two structural equation models were compared to evaluate the relationship between parental wealth, parental schooling, childhood academic achievement, ego’s schooling, and economic wellbeing. The results show that there are statistical differences between the cases of Mexico and Chile in terms of the stratification process. In Mexico, parental wealth and childhood academic achievement are the variables that best explain both the final level of schooling as well as the ego’s own socioeconomic wellbeing. In Chile, education functions as a variable that interrupts the weight of the inter-generational inheritance. It is discussed then that the State in Mexico has failed in providing an educational system that can break the inertia of the association between origins and destinies. The final section discusses also the importance of childhood academic achievement, which calls upon keeping children in their classrooms, at least for the time period that the law mandates.
