Abstract

This research aims to understand the meanings of citizenship education forChilean teachers. Based on thisframework, the concepts of citizenship and education are discussed concisely inrelation totheir equivalence with the politicalsphereand the commons. The analysis of 81 individual interviews and 2 focus groups of teachers from the Valparaiso region, Chile, raised various matrix categories. However, this article focuses only on the Neoliberalismmatrix, which includes discursive lines linked to a subject who sometimes feels defeated, nullified, subdued, self-marginalised, and isolatedin a climate ofindividualistic competitiveness. Another subcategory that emerges from the matrix of neoliberalism relatesto discourses that refer to school having becomea commodity, in which economic resources arethesupreme value and a guiding principle that determines practices and policies, configuring students and families as clients, as exemplified by thelogic of vouchers. Finally, teachers complain about the growing culture of bureaucratization in which they are trapped in accountability processes within aframework of pedagogical pragmatism, linked to observable behaviours throughstandardised measurement bymeans ofstandardised tests