This article intends to rescue the inflection recently occurred on the education politics of Latin America, taking as starting point two specific situations: Mexico and Chile. It considers that such politics have been implemented since a logic related to capitalist globalization in course, whose are expressions of the correlation of social forces in a concrete space; This article intends to identify in which way common guidelines, defined by international organisms, interact with effective cultural characteristics of each country. Such preoccupation is product of the perception of social function of the education area and its dynamics as contradictions expression. It is ended that, although goal of similar politics, education reality in these two countries expresses different situations: in Mexico, there is a "conservative rupture", by its regressive character, and in Chile there is a "conservative continuity".
education politics; globalization; education reforms in Latin America