A Genealogy of Security and Education. History, Policies, and Experiences in the Chilean Context

This research examines the historical and political entanglements between education and security in Chile from the late nineteenth century to the present — a relationship that has remained underexplored despite its relevance to contemporary educational policy and debate. The central contribution of this thesis lies in offering a genealogical account of how schools, often understood as spaces of inclusion and learning, have simultaneously functioned as vectors for managing risk, regulating conduct, and governing populations mobilised in the name of collective protection and securing the future. Drawing on Foucauldian studies of governmentality, the research analyses school practices through the axes of knowledge/truth, normativity, and subjectivity, configuring what is described as a “security dimension” that has shaped educational experiences. The study combines archival analysis with empirical fieldwork in Chilean schools, engaging with policy documents, media discourse, and first-person accounts from students and psychosocial professionals. This multiple methods approach enables a situated understanding of how past rationalities persist and mutate in present-day concerns around security. Findings show that schools have historically operated as strategic sites within a broader security dispositif, responding to perceived threats such as racial degeneration, abnormal childhood, moral disorder, delinquency, and later, psychological distress, violence, and sexuality. These risks were mediated by expert knowledge — hygiene, psychology, criminology, mental health — and managed through institutional mechanisms of classification, surveillance, and intervention. In contemporary contexts, these legacies re-emerge through disciplinary routines, monitoring tools, and therapeutic frameworks that portray students as both vulnerable and potentially threatening. Schools translate diffuse anxieties into concrete procedures of governance. Challenging dominant framings of schooling, this perspective opens new lines of inquiry into the political functions of education, while contributing to the sociology and history of education — particularly within the Global South — offering conceptual tools to rethink educational policy in areas such as inclusion, wellbeing, and securitisation.