Distance education during the pandemic: a new manifestation of structural and symbolic violence in Mexico

Abstract

Distance education found in Mexico a student-age population with great inequalities, as well as a high percentage of children and teenage students in situations of marginalization and vulnerability. The transfer of structural violence typical of the school environment to the household made visible the existing gaps and widened inequality, adding precariousness and deprivation to the lives of minors living in marginalized areas. Bourdieu's theoretical contributions on social reproduction and symbolic violence as well as Galtung’s on structural, cultural, and direct violence, allow us to analyze from another facet, different from the pedagogical one, the effects that the transfer of face-to-face education to the distance mode entails, as well as those that they will have in the short and medium term. Under this perspective, the results of academic achievement, internet access and school characteristics become variables that help us understand the reproduction of inequalities and the increase in structural violence in Mexico.