Institutional reform in nation-states in formation is essentially the outcome of partisan debate and negotiation involving individuals, parties, coalitions, and interest groups. Educational reform programs are inseparable from political struggles. They are far more than academic or intellectual exercises in pedagogical theory and practice. Inextricable from foreign influences, nationalist tradition, church-state issues, and rank opportunism, even from military political action, educational reform is a component of any emergent nation’s cultural, economic, political, and social history. It certainly was in twentieth-century Chile.Seis Episodios de la Educación Chilena deftly and tersely details the history of educational reform, especially that of primary education, up to the point where the election of a Marxist president put Chilean history and politics, hence educational reform, to the supreme test. In six essays and a brief conclusion, five acutely perceptive Chilean scholars describe and analyze primary- and secondary-education policy prior to World War I; the background, formulation, and ultimately disappointing fate of the reform programs of 1920, 1927 – 28, and 1945; and the exhaustive study and planning for reform that went on between 1961 and 1964 leading to the sweeping legislation of 1965. Each stage of the struggle to create a public educational system reflective of and responsive to national needs provides new perspectives on Chilean history and a who’s who of proponents and opponents otherwise known for their intellectual, political, or professional achievements.Early in the past century the Chilean state ceased to be solely an organ of oligarchic control and began to act like a provider of services to the expanding polity and workforce. Illiteracy hovered above 50 percent of the population; barely 10 percent of primary-school-age children regularly attended classes. Secondary education was the priority of both the public and private sectors. Reformers confronted a set of pedagogical theories and practices propounded by the likes of Johann Friedrich Harbart (1776 – 1841) and Andrés Bello (1781 – 1865) that served the interests of the status quo by stressing discipline, rote learning, and hierarchy, and which were unsuccessfully adapted to changing times with the founding of the briefly German-dominated Instituto Pedagógico Nacional in 1889. A century after independence, education did little to prepare Chilean youth for the changing needs of a postcolonial nation-state. As elsewhere in the region, the independence centennial provoked some serious debate on the country’s heritage and future.Things came to a head in 1911 – 12. Francisco Antonio Encina’s Nuestra inferioridad económica: Sus causas, sus consecuencias (1912) provoked heated debate over the relationship between ordered socioeconomic progress and the necessity of preparing citizens for it that would dominate proposals for reforms, and opposition to them, for half a century. Proponents of a left-of-center ideology would urge an expanded state role in the process of democratization and a greater focus on the links between education and economic development. Opponents argued that increased state activism — in standardization of curricula, for example — was the nefarious result of foreign influence, would ultimately corrupt traditional Chilean values, violated “freedom of instruction,” and constituted an intrusion of the state into the domain of the family. The intensity of their arguments increased relevant to their position to the right of center for the better part of a half-century.Post –World War I administrations began to assert the state’s role formally. The Constitution of 1925 made pre-university education a state responsibility, and primary education became obligatory. Although attendance rose and illiteracy rates fell, population growth meant that the raw number of children not in classrooms grew too. Despite the well-intended reforms of the 1920s, frustration outpaced success through the Great Depression and during the bitter ideological struggles of the 1930s. The onset of the Cold War helped create consensus that motivated mainstream planners, policy makers, and pedagogues to agree on nonpartisan approaches that served national interests. Meanwhile illiteracy fell to 16 percent by 1964, but half the school-age population still had no schooling.Responses to outside stimuli — the global ideological struggle and developmental schemes supported by both U. S. and national leadership — encouraged Chilean leaders to strive assiduously to address the country’s manifest educational needs at all levels, at long last. The Reform Act of 1965 thus was the first reform measure to take into account both structural and functional aspects of the state’s responsibility to prepare all Chileans for participation in every aspect of national life. Were it not for the election of 1970 and its aftermath, the 1965 legislation might have responded to the questions posed and arguments sustained over the course of a half-century.This ably written and well-documented work goes beyond its title and stated purpose. It should serve as a model for comparative regional studies. If the history of educational reform was so politicized in twentieth-century Chile, could it have been any less so elsewhere in the region?