The Prefeco: between the educational field and the political field

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show the conflict between the political and educational fields in which actors of Federal High Schools by Cooperation (Prefeco, by its acronym in Spanish) in Morelos, Mexico participate. Such conflict started when the State did not acknowledge these high schools as a public subsystem, accentuating the precarious employment conditions for teachers and the unequal conditions of the schools for their operation. The discussion for understanding the Prefeco’s persistence was built on the approaches of Elias’s game theory, Bourdieu’s fields theory and Brachet-Márquez’s domination and contention theory. This is a qualitative study, which adopts the guidelines of the historical narrative method to compare the origin and current status of Prefecos in Morelos. Descriptive statistics were applied to the results of a questionnaire applied to 90 teachers, in order to learn about their employment conditions. The discourse of personnel of a Prefeco was explored with semi-structured interviews. The main findings point to the use that the actors make of their social and political capital as elements of the game to content with the Mexican State.