Resumen de La tesis del declive institucional de la escuela en Europa y Latinoamérica. Variaciones interpretativas y crítica al uso a-histórico de las teorías noroccidentales
Pablo Neut Aguayo, Paula Lozano Mulet
During the last decades, the thesis of the institutional decline of the school has been con-solidated in the field of social sciences. This maintains that the educational institution has lost itsinstituting potential, that is, its capacity to institute a specific subjectivity, just as had happened duringmodernity. This thesis, initially emerging in Europe, has been replicated for the analysis of the LatinAmerican educational field. The objective of this article is to problematize this conceptual “loan.” Todo this, we expose the interpretative assumptions developed in both contexts, highlighting their meet-ing points, and their differences. Subsequently, we argue that the idea of an institutional decline of theschool is conveniently adjusted to analyse societies historically characterised by the development ofa type of institutional individualism (European or Northwestern), but it is less plausible where the so-cial “production” of the individual It has not resulted from the performative action of institutions, butfrom a type of hyper-agentic exercise of subjectivation (Latin America). The above implies a cautionregarding the uncritical use of interpretive models developed in different socio-historical contexts, anexercise commonly carried out in Latin American social and educational sciences.
