Abstract

The closure of rural municipal schools in Chile is a phenomenon that becomes relevant in recent years. These decisions have ceased to be isolated, materializing as a policy that has been poorly studied. With the objective to analyze and understand the psychosocial processes that emerge at the level of local community and school when closing a rural school, develops a qualitative research with quasi ethnographic in two rural communities in the south of Chile, where the schools were closed after the earthquake in 2010. The results of the research suggest that the closure or schools in rural contexts affect the social cohesion at different levels, where the particularly way of the closure happens is very important.