My thesis will aim to provide a detailed analysis of the effects of different forms of privatization of education as a result of neoliberal policies across Africa and Chile, defend the importance of the state’s role in providing good and equitable education, and offer explanations as to why good and equitable public education under capitalism and neoliberalism is extremely difficult. “Globalization” describes the spread of the flow of capital, goods, technology, and information across countries and the interaction of people and cultures that comes with it. In the third era of globalization in the late 20th century, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund continued to promote neoliberal reforms among developing countries in order to grow their economies. But neoliberalism, a political-economic ideology that promotes the deregulation of the economy and free market principles, also seeks to abolish the welfare state by transferring public services-such as education-into private hands in the process of privatization. The privatization of education can occur in many forms, such as outsourcing and contracting, Public-Private Partnerships, private companies assuming full ownership of the school, low fee private schools (LFPs), user fees and vouchers, and chartering. The changing role of the state in education as a result of these neoliberal reforms in the form of privatization has contributed greatly to the growing inequality in developing countries and all across the world. 

It is extremely important to protect education from the goals of neoliberalism because education has and will always be a vehicle for social change and an important part of the identity. Good public education is responsible for teaching all citizens how to be critical thinkers and participatory members of society, which should include the intellectual ability to participate in government and challenge systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and capitalism, to name a few, in order to reach equality. A good education is also a key instrument in the mobility up the socioeconomic ladder, and provides students with the skills and resources needed to obtain livable wages. Without equitable education, not every child has equal opportunity to achieve success. Examining the privatization of education as a result of neoliberal reforms is important because key features of neoliberalism- competitiveness, profit, individualism, decentralization, and free-market thinking-aim to prevent equitable modes of education from occurring in order to maintain inequality. The privatization of education has serious implications for lower class families around the globe, such as poorer quality of education and the burden of education being transferred from the state to private sources, which includes the family, as seen in one of the examples I examine, the for-profit elementary schools being created across Africa called Bridge International Academies (Wadekar and Grim 2023). Without quality of education, lower class families remain vulnerable to exploitation as they do not have the tools to climb up the social and economic ladder. My research aims to not only bring awareness to the disproportionate affects the privatization of education has on low income families across the world, but also seeks to address the difficulties of creating good public education under the context of global capitalism and promote a reflection of the way in which modern education is structured.