Personalization and competition in elite schools in Buenos Aires: school strategies for the production and legitimization of dominant groups

Abstract

This article analyses the strategies found in two elite secondary institutions in Buenos Aires designed to legitimise the selection of students aspiring to become members of the elite. The first are personalization strategies where teachers and students work together with the aim of facilitating success in examinations. The second are strategies that promote competition between students, which have the effect of the students being responsible for their success. Field work took place in two schools, where interviews were conducted with the principals, teachers of different subjects and parents. Both schools use examinations as a mechanism for justifying their students’ merits, but develop different pedagogies to achieve this. The private school which recruits the children of the economic elite implements strategies to maximise students’ results by grouping them according to individual performance and facilitating the development of supportive relationships with teachers. At the public school, individual competition is fostered, where students find themselves in large classes and pupils appear to be an ‘anonymous’ mass. In this school, where mostly the cultural and intellectual elite send their children, merit is also justified through performance, but it is emphasised that young people have attained high results as a result of their, hard work.

Keywords:

• Personalised education
• competition
• teacher–student relationships
• elites
• Argentina

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the feedback on the earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Claire Maxwell and Marte Mangset for their invaluable suggestions to improve the text and arguments as well as their help in the editing process.

Notes

1. Source: Compilation based on the annual survey by Argentina’s National Directorate for Information on and Assessment of the Quality of Education (DiNIECE).

2. Source: Compilation based on data of the 2011 Permanent Survey of Households by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses. The top quintile is the wealthiest 20% of the population.

3. Secondary school in Argentina is attended by students from 13 to 17 years of age.

4. April 2010.