Social and Cognitive Justice: The Social Relevance of the Higher Education in Latin America

Abstract

Latin America, characterized by being a multicultural and multi-ethnic region, has become in these early years of the new millennium a demonstration of creativity and social innovation while a laboratory of experiments in privatization and marketing raised to the degree, product of neoliberal policies that plagued the state from the Chilean coup of 1973 onward. Currently, the region is drawn through the coexistence of the worst social inequality with self-organization of complex social justice experiences carried out both by minority groups as movements that have arrived to state power. The development of renewable forms of democracy present in Latin American countries strengthened since the second half of the twentieth century, and the processes of integration of countries in the region that since the end of this millennium have taken more autonomous courses while being integrated are demanding forms of social justice to expand and reach those sectors still lag behind. This chapter is a contribution to better analyze higher education in Latin America, the current challenges in social and cognitive justice, equity, and social cohesion from an Ibero-American perspective.