Capitalist Contaminations of Childhood and Pedagogical Dilutions of Literature during Chile’s Popular Unity Government (1970-1973)

This article explores the relationship between literature, childhoods, and youth in the educational sphere during the Popular Unity administration (UP) in Chile (1970-1973). The Chilean revolutionary process had curricular and pedagogical repercussions, exposing discomfort towards educational curricula and the hegemony of pedagogical methodologies employed for teaching literature in Chile. Rather than a concrete step-by-step programme for curricular and pedagogical reforms, this research will shed light on the array of institutional interventions and proposals that sought to redefine the relationships among childhoods, youths, and literature during the UP, aimed at dissolving idealised and elitist notions of literature into more ample categories of artistic works. I argue that such proposals illuminate perceptions of childhood and adolescence imbued with ideas of purity and contamination, in which cultural actors in the ecosystems of literature and education regard themselves as impervious to the risks of manipulation and, from the certainty of their positions, test various strategies to shape future citizens that meet the needs of Chile’s socialist project.