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This paper begins by historicizing certain issues that are put at stake in the extension of mandatory schooling in Argentina, as elaborated in the 2006 National Education Law which, in which from its extension to the end of secondary education it includes more actors and institutions. In order to accomplish this, laws and regulations are analyzed, as well as parliamentary debates and various documents. The second half of this paper accounts for the different circulating meanings regarding to the schooling of those who attend Secondary Level Educational Centers (students, teachers, directors). Since they did not tend to identify youths and adults as subjects of the regulation that establishes compulsory education, it is argued that historical configurations intervene in this stance, configurations that are linked to said command as well as to personal experiences. In this second half of the paper, the records of the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two Secondary Level Educational Centers are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to show the political ideological conceptions held by the public education policies in the province of La Pampa between 1984-1996. This period of time is the one beginning with the restoration of democracy and ending with the sanction of the Provincial Law of Education. The eighties were characterized by the reestablishment of institutional order and the attempt to design and establish policies based on the State of Welfare conception. During this period, the search for agreement with the provincial government and the teachers was mediated by the teacher's trade union which obtained historically claimed rights and labour achievements. In the nineties, neoliberal policies and the demands from international organizations give origin to deep changes in the educational system of La Pampa. The trend towards decentralization and the State reform policy account for the structural change implied by a new relationship between State and society. New strategies in the search for support appear; trade unions are no longer the privileged speakers; they have been shifted by the euphemism of «community participation» This analysis tries to trace in the official political discourse evidence of the above mentioned change in the idea of the role of the State in educational matters on the one hand, an on the other, the change in the strategies searching for support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]