The Subject and the Everyday in the Neo-liberal Age: The Case of Chilean Education

This article discusses the subjectivization that individuals experience in their choices and educational trajectories in the context of an advanced neo-liberal society such as Chile. It relies on two qualitative research projects which have followed the educational choices of par-ents regarding their children and of teenagers regarding their post-high school future. The structural transformation that drives the neolib-eral turn causes new popular sectors to emerge in the context of a broad commercialization of social relations, which reaches education by configuring it under the logic of the market. In such dynamics, educational choices and their subjective inscription -here called educational marketing- allow for noticing a new pan-orama of social stratification. The apparently autonomous educational choices are marking the real and new stratification of society. Educa-tional marketing is projected as a link between structure and subjectivity, forming subjects in a high individualization of their social repro-duction.