Ecuadorian higher education policy combines the constitutional recognition of education as a right with admission rules that allocate scarce quotas through academic background, evaluations, and affirmative action measures. The objective of this article is to determine under what conditions meritocratic admission fulfills a legitimate allocative function and under which it becomes a judgment about the intellectual value of the applicants. A conceptual analysis is employed: Jacques Rancière's concepts of explanatory order, dumbness, intellectual emancipation, and equality of intelligences are placed in dialogue with meritocracy research, with the current regulatory framework, and with the available evidence on unequal access in Ecuador. The analysis distinguishes three propositions that are often confused: that applicants differ in their demonstrated preparation, that institutions should assign limited quotas, and that the resulting ordering reveals unequal intelligences. Only the first two are necessary to admit; the third is an inference that the framework allows to be questioned. Four conditions are specified: semantic totalization, interpretative monopoly, temporal fixation, and public circulation of the verdict under which an assignative procedure becomes part of an explanatory order, and it is shown that they are separable from assignment and therefore institutionally modifiable. Five rights-oriented design principles are proposed, with their stated foundation. It is concluded that a defensible alternative is not selection without standards, but selection that limits the meaning attributed to its instruments and identifies testable directions for future empirical research.
Emancipatory education aims to foster learners’ critical engagement with knowledge, often by implementing classroom critical-thinking practice. Socio-emotional skills can support this process by creating trusting, dialogic, and responsive environments which enable critical reflection. This study examines how school climate and teacher autonomy shape this mechanism. This analysis includes 54,310 teachers from 18 countries from the 2024 TALIS dataset. Four moderated mediation models were estimated to test whether socio-emotional skills mediate the relationship between school climate and autonomy and critical-thinking practice, and whether these pathways differ between teachers active in social sciences and other subjects. Results show that school climate and autonomy are positively associated with critical-thinking practice, with socio-emotional skills acting as a partial mediator. For teachers with social science education, the indirect effects are stronger. The findings suggest that emancipatory teaching depends not only on teacher beliefs and classroom practices, but also on supportive institutional conditions and subject-specific preparation.
آموزش رهایی‌بخش با هدف تقویت مشارکت انتقادی یادگیرندگان با دانش، اغلب از طریق اجرای تمرین تفکر انتقادی در کلاس درس دنبال می‌شود. مهارت‌های اجتماعی-هیجانی می‌توانند با ایجاد محیط‌های مبتنی بر اعتماد، گفت‌وگو و پاسخگویی، این فرایند را با فراهم آوردن بستر تأمل انتقادی حمایت کنند. این مطالعه بررسی می‌کند که اقلیم مدرسه و خودمختاری معلم چگونه این سازوکار را شکل می‌دهند. این تحلیل شامل ۵۴٬۳۱۰ معلم از ۱۸ کشور بر اساس داده‌های TALIS 2024 است. چهار مدل میانجی‌گری تعدیل‌شده برای آزمون این‌که آیا مهارت‌های اجتماعی-هیجانی رابطه بین اقلیم مدرسه و خودمختاری با تمرین تفکر انتقادی را میانجی‌گری می‌کنند و این مسیرها بین معلمان فعال در علوم اجتماعی و سایر دروس متفاوت است یا خیر، برآورد شد. نتایج نشان می‌دهد که اقلیم مدرسه و خودمختاری با تمرین تفکر انتقادی رابطه مثبت دارند و مهارت‌های اجتماعی-هیجانی به عنوان میانجی جزئی عمل می‌کنند. برای معلمانی که در آموزش علوم اجتماعی فعالیت دارند، اثرات غیرمستقیم قوی‌تر است. یافته‌ها حاکی از آن است که تدریس رهایی‌بخش نه تنها به باورهای معلم و شیوه‌های کلاسی، بلکه به شرایط حمایتی نهادی و آمادگی موضوع‌محور نیز وابسته است.
