Middle-class mothers’ passionate attachment to school choice: abject objects, cruel optimism and affective exploitation^*

* A previous publication presenting some of the findings of the research project can be found in Rojas, Falabella, and Leyton (2016).

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on a qualitative study about middle-class mothers’ experiences of school choice in Chile. It draws on Butler, Berlant and Hardt’s work on affects, and on feminist contributions to the intersection between school choice, social class and mothering. These contributions help us deepen our understanding of school choice as both a form of passionate attachment to the education market and affective labour. In addition, these perspectives motivate us to go beyond social research sustaining the dominant critical discourse of advantages that middle-classes gain over working-classes through their work in the education market. Our analyses suggest that school choice configures cruel passionate attachments to the education market on middle-class mothers through the construction of working-class ‘others’, and models public education as an abject object through the intensification of mothers’ affective labour, thus reinforcing their experiences of gendered and affective inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• social class
• school choice
• subjectification
• gender inequalities

Acknowledgements

The authors thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and encouraging comments on this paper. We would also like to thank Luis Carabantes, Ximena Galdames, Francisca Corbalán, and Sara Joiko who read and commented previous drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Leyton is a sociologist and doctoral researcher in the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research at the University of Sussex. His research interests include policies, discourses and affects in education; social class, gender and subjectivities; and feminist, poststructuralist and post-critical perspectives.

María Teresa Rojas is PhD in Education Sciences at the Universidad Católica/René Descartes-Paris University 5. She is currently the Director of the PhD in Education at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. Her research interests include education policies, sociology of school, issues of education inclusion, equity and justice, and family–education relationships.

Notes

* A previous publication presenting some of the findings of the research project can be found in Rojas, Falabella, and Leyton (2016).

1. Alongside the school choice reform, a transfer of state schools to municipalities took place. New subsidised-private schools were fostered; these started as institutions free of charge, but in 1993 were allowed to charge fees.

2. For instance, in 2013, a campaign for early child enrolment in nursery schools was launched. The ministry of education stated: ‘Parents’ cultural capital, especially that of mothers’, due to its incidence in language development, hence “mother tongue” – is key in children’s development’. Available at: http://2010-2014.gob.cl/informa/2013/07/19/presidente-de-la-republica-y-ministra-de-educacion-lanzan-campana-para-incentivar-matricula-en-preki.htm. Accessed on 22 May 2016.

3. The entire research was carried out between 2012 and 2015 in two stages. Firstly, these 15 in-depth interviews were conducted. Secondly, we conducted a new round of in-depth interviews with 10 of these mothers. We met them repeatedly, at their homes and on their way from their homes to the school. For the purpose of this article, the interviews developed in the first stage of fieldwork comprise our empirical corpus of analysis given their primary focus on school choice’s narratives highlighting its rationalities, tensions and emotionalities expressed by the interviewed middle-class mothers.

4. These categories are based on the Social Priority Index constructed by ‘SEREMI Desarrollo Social Región Metropolitana’. It takes into account different indicators regarding Income, Education and Health per municipality. Its categories are ordinal and categorised as follow: Higher Social Priority (representing municipalities with the worst socioeconomic conditions); Middle–High Social Priority; Middle–Low Social Priority; Lower Social Priority; No Social Priority (representing the municipalities with the best socioeconomic conditions).

5. For synthetic information of the main characteristics of the interviewees see Table A1 in Appendix.

6. In 2010, the then Minister of Education, Joaquin Lavin, launched an accountability policy to guide school choice. This policy rated schools according to their performance in the SIMCE test. The schools were marked red, yellow, and green for scores below the average, average, and above the average correspondingly.

7. PSU is the national university entry test.

8. Martinic (2006) presents data based on the CIDE 2001 and 2003 surveys with more than 70% of mothers participating in different activities of their children. In contrast, fathers participate less than 30%. The same surveys, which are applied to ‘actors of the educational system’, always appeal to women as a mechanism naming the actors of the educational system. In fact, in the 2012 CIDE survey, 81% of the surveyed subjects are women, and 77% are the students’ mothers.

9. According to Aguayo, Correa, and Cristi (2011), this inequality is associated with the representation of masculinity emerging from men’s perceptions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Research on Educational Policy and Practice (CEPPE) http://www.ceppeuc.cl/. CEPPE is based on Chile, and between 2012 and 2015, was a collaborative research space between Universidad de la Frontera, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Fundación Chile, and Universidad Alberto Hurtado. This article is part of the research project (2012–2015) ‘Clases medias y estrategias educativas familiares’ (Middle-classes and family educational strategies) within the research strand ‘Education policies and school markets in Chile’.