Mass Media and Recent History. A study with Chilean secondary school students

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse Chilean secondary-education students’ ideas regarding this nation’s transition to democracy, taking special interest in their sources of historical knowledge concerning this process. This study, which applies a mixed-methods approach, makes use of the narratives obtained from 616 students belonging to private, subsidised and municipal schools located in Chile’s main urban areas. Students’ perceptions are gathered by using a closed and open-ended questionnaire, and analysed by using a statistical computer software. The results show that, despite the high formative potential of history classes, the Chilean transition to democracy is not given a prominent importance in schools, leaving students no other choice than to resort to extracurricular sources to gain access to this knowledge.