Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between education policy and economic development in rural territories in Chile, and the resulting influences upon school practices and secondary students’ subjectivities. The study is based in the rural settings of Chile, a country with an internationally recognized educational policy frame, as one of the pioneers in introducing radical market mechanisms, with large consequences for educational inequality and segregation. Based on a qualitative study developed between 2014 and 2017, and using a poststructural theoretical approach for the analysis, the chapter presents a critical review of the main discursive influences and features in relevant policy frames regarding rural development and rural education policies in Chile and beyond. Additionally, the chapter analyzes voices of academic and policy stakeholders’ close to rural education. Together these analyses provide a practical insight to the topic. Rural schooling is presented as an invisible educational reality under an unarticulated policy frame, producing dissimilar educational dynamics in such geographical settings. The absence of focalized educational policies to rural spaces generates diverse assemblages between educational and business institutions, in what can be called as an “intimate relationship” between schools and industrial companies of the zones, where schools, especially through their TVET curricular alternatives, try to fit their educational frames with the labor needs of the companies of the rural zones. This dynamic produces particular educational arrangements, which, concretely, forms particular educational paths for rural students. In those terms, these educational-economic assemblages have a productive power, as they, while influencing and conditioning students’ future educational and labor horizons, produce certain type of subjectivities, establishing the margins of what is possible in such social and institutional scenarios.