Date of Award

1-1-2012

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies

Program

Spanish

Content Description

1 online resource (viii, 68 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Fernando Leiva

Keywords

Education, Neoliberalism, Nonprofit, Social Reproduction, Educational change, Equality

Subject Categories

Education | Latin American Studies

Abstract

This Master's project explores education's impact on socio-cultural and economic reproduction in Juticalpa, Honduras. Utilizing comparative analysis, I investigate the education system in Juticalpa employing a public, private, and a nonprofit school as analytical lenses to illustrate how schools reproduce certain existing inequalities and create new ones in this city. The purpose in the following pages is three-fold. First, I conceptualize and explain the neoliberal education discourses on the need to create alternatives to public education, such as private and nonprofit education institutions. Secondly, after contextualizing these education discourses, I use social reproduction theory to investigate how schools reproduce existing linguistic and cultural inequality based on the students' socio-economic background; how the private and nonprofit school reproduce discriminatory racial tendencies; how all three schools studied reproduce feminine gender identity as inferior, subjugated, and oppressed; and finally, how education has an impact on economic reproduction based on the students socio-economic and family background, linguistic reproduction, and gender identity. Third, this thesis contributes a new framework to analyze education's socio-cultural reproduction by studying more than just one kind of educational institution. Instead of only analyzing public schools, which are mainly studied by social reproductionists, I also study a private and a nonprofit school. Since the nonprofit institution was the latest school to surface as a `real alternative' to the divisions created by the public and private school, I focus on highlighting nonprofits education's socio-cultural and economic reproduction. This thesis' initial hypothesis assumed that the nonprofit institution was an alternative to the inequality gap produced by private and public education. However, the data collected negates such a hypothesis and illustrates how the nonprofit school also reproduces inequality in Juticalpa, Honduras.

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