Abstract

In Chile, the education policies of the last 50 years have been configured as a hegemonic space for interventionism by national groups and pro-neoliberal international organisations. Under the promise of improved efficiency and quality of the education system, school communities have been aligned through constant control. Because of its strategic character, the school curriculum, in its design, implementation and evaluation, has been a key part of the latter task. This article aims to reveal the networks, links and milestones of this trajectory from a perspective of reflexive and historical-critical analysis with the objective of identifying the contradictions of design in what has been catalogued as a neoliberal laboratory-device in Latin America. For this purpose, a methodological procedure of socio-historical reconstruction is adopted, based on the latest documents generated around the phenomenon of Chilean education, allowing us to focus on the devices of control and assurance of an intentional continuum in the observed period that transcends the political option. The results and the analysis of the consequences of this process reveal that the curriculum functions as the central element of intervention and the axis of understanding of the implementation of a social system that ends up configuring an education that has become an engine of segregation, an issue that is also visible in the perpetuation of socially and educationally marginalised groups. © © 2023 The Authors.