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A heightened sense of competition is observable in school information evenings as well. For example, prospective parents and students see more families showing up than there are seats available in the auditorium. In one information evening that I attended, people sat on the steps because there were no empty seats. I learned that every year about 600 families apply for 30 spots in that particular selective public choice school (Fieldnote, Nov 19, 2009). Indeed, one of my study participants, Matthew, a Grade 8 middle-class, European–Canadian, mini student at West High, commented that after sitting in a district examination with about 500 students to qualify for mini schools, he came to believe that he and other mini students were selected through a “seriously rigorous process of elimination”. In other words, the required standardized test-taking as part of the new process of the education market has become a mechanism for competition that produces distinctions between those who are successful as learner-performers and everyone else. 

—Yoon, E. (2016). Neoliberal imaginary, school choice, and “new elites” in public secondary schools. Curriculum Inquiry (46)4, 369-387, DOI:  

Our typology is built on three dimensions: internality, types of participants, and the degree of effective resistance. For our study, a civil war is any armed conflict that involves (a) military action internal to the metropole, (b) the active participation of the national government, and (c) effective resistance by both sides. With these criteria, we differentiate civil wars from other types of internal violent conflicts. 

—Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 

The lived reality of these students, as of many others in the global South, is that it is almost normal that people leave the country; these fractures are a common part of their lives. Guanajuato students identified two ways emigration patterns represented violence. First, it left them abandoned by parents or close relatives; the bad material conditions and underemployment their parents endured in Guanajuato obliged them to travel. Second, students said that they had learned that the promise of a better future via migration quickly turned into a nightmare, because of the risks involved in illegally entering or as exploited workers in another country. 

 —Nieto, D. & Bickmore, K. (2017). Immigration and emigration: Canadian and Mexican youth making sense of a globalized conflict. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 36-49, DOI:  

Historical memory, both persistent and malleable, was also instrumental in both settings. In Guatemala, inclusion of Indigenous historical memory at Nuestro Futuro provided an opportunity for students to grapple with the past, circumventing the silence created by an official curriculum that, in its focus on reconstructing the state as a liberal, multicultural democracy, occluded the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000) impacting Indigenous communities over time. Historical memory, however, also means contending with the nostalgic counter memories, held by these affluent Ladino students, of the era of the armed conflict as a time of security. In Poland, historical memory reinforced exclusionary nationalist discourses as the country veered to the right. Neither Poland nor Guatemala has officially used the opportunity of post-conflict reconstruction to engage young people in critical reimagination of belonging and citizenship through the historical prism.

- Rubin, B. C., & Cervinkova, H. (2020). Challenging Silences: Democratic Citizenship Education and Historical Memory in Poland and Guatemala. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 51(2), 178–194. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12329