bostonreview:

Americans may have much to learn from the upwelling of public sentiment against privatized education in Chile. The United States is just starting down the long road toward outsourcing education to private interests such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). But in Chile we see what four decades of privatized education can achieve, particularly when it is backed by a dictatorship capable of enforcing a free market that might, in a less authoritarian setting, have been constrained. Chile has long been cited as the great neoliberal example. The question is what it is an example of. If President Lagos’s explanation is correct, Chile has little to teach us, since many of its internal conflicts are more or less in keeping with its progress as a developing nation. But if Mayol is right—if the protests over education are indeed the cries of a society that wants out from marketization—we should be watching Chile very closely.
Read Lili Loofbourow on Chile’s experiment in privatizing higher education. (Boston Review, May/June 2013)
@1 hour ago with 3 notes
"I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist, racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between these two points is the liberal. As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and the reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are ‘liberals’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges."
@2 hours ago with 1194 notes