Beyond public vs. private: the ideational transformation of education in Chile’s market society

This study examines how four decades of market-oriented reforms in Chile have transformed the ideational foundations of educational discourse, creating conceptual barriers to reform beyond institutional arrangements. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of interviews with 39 elite educational stakeholders, the research identifies four fault lines where market logic has altered core educational concepts: contradictions between meritocratic ideals and structural inequalities, the reconceptualization of public education as residual state service, the transformation of private provision from mission-oriented service to profit-driven enterprise, and the creation of educational subjectivities that equate agency with consumer choice. These transformations have narrowed the discursive terrain for imagining alternatives, demonstrating how neoliberal hegemony operates through conceptual colon­ization rather than structural coercion alone. The study proposes reconceptualizing education as a societal good that transcends public-private binaries, emphasizing education’s constitutive role in democratic life, and revealing how market reforms reshape the conceptual foundations through which educational possibilities are imagined.