Conference Program

This contribution examines the narratives on the role of secondary school teachers shaped by educational policies in Argentina, currently governed by far-right president Javier Milei. We focus here on two jurisdictions, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA, in Spanish) and Santa Fe, whose current right-wing governments crystallize the New Right national governmental framework. Thus, their educational policies show the globally on-going convergence and negotiation between far-right, neoliberal and traditional rationalities (Bonnet, 2024; Guidici et al., 2025).

Our research follows an anthropology of public policies approach, which allows us to interpret the discursive morality and normativity produced by educational policies, and their relation to social conflicts and structures (Shore y Wright, 1997; Shore, 2010). We have gathered a diverse corpus, which reflects the discursive universe of educational policies for secondary education in Santa Fe and CABA. Following a multi-scaled and comparative approach, we included: laws and legal documents, government orientations addressed to teachers, official reports and press statements, and documents issued by teachers’ unions.

The analysis shows how, within the context of a broader global narrative constructing a “crisis” of public education (Pini and Amaré 2025), teachers are simultaneously manufactured as the main agent and, at the same time, the enemy of educational change.

On the one hand, public policy for secondary education focuses on technocratic management via the transformation of individual teaching practices, set as a key element of flexibilisation, innovation and modernisation. Thus, neoliberal rationality shapes a narrative that overestimates individual agency, holding teachers responsible for change and neglecting the material and structural conditions of education (Meo et al., 2023; Sorondo and Alucin, in press). This rationality seems to find a fertile ground in the historical moralisation of teacher identity, as laic apostles of civilisation (Ascolani, 1999).

On the other hand, in convergence with conservative morality, this discourse also deploys antagonising and suspicion-based strategies in the reshaping of secondary education teachers’ identities (Normand, 2024). Disciplinary and accountability policies regarding attendance and working conditions aim to build a common image of teachers as “lazy”, “unengaged” and “anti-innovation”. Reinvigorating narratives from past dictatorships, political and unionised engagements are also demonised, as so-called “anti-adoctrination” policies, based on discipline- and punish-mechanisms (Larrondo, 2025), are being promoted at a national and local scale.

Our comparative analysis shows that, while CABA’s well rooted neoliberal educational framework smoothly transitions towards a more authoritarian moralising approach, Santa Fe’s turn from social-educational policies towards a more individualised and fragmented perspective speaks of an inconspicuous and often concealed continuity between progressive-neoliberal and (far-)right policies. Despite the different contexts, both Santa Fe and CABA’s educational policies partake in reshaping teachers’ identity towards the desintegration of collective approaches to education (Gluz y Kesler, 2024). Exploring these cases allows us to delve deeper in the configuration of the New Right narrative in education, showing that, rather than an entirely new discourse, it emerges from an heterogenous articulation between neoliberal normative logic and authoritarian and repressive strategies (Dardot et al., 2021), as well as historically sedimented rationalities in the educational field.