The advances of capitalism in its digital age are generating significant changes in global education policy, transforming public education systems in Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean. It is urgent to analyze these global transformations precisely within and from this context of the Global South. Once analyzed, it is necessary—and equally urgent—for the main processes of resistance to the development of capitalism in its digital age in education to emerge from Latin America. And for these responses to the advances of capitalism to emerge, nothing is more timely and necessary than to update the important tradition of critical pedagogies, in order to articulate, alongside social and popular movements, global resistance processes for the unwavering defense of public education.

While the current global capitalist crisis, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, has intensified the advances of capitalist development in its digital age in education in Latin America (Bonilla-Molina, 2020), the beginnings of these transformative processes have a broader, more global trajectory. With the 2008 global capitalist crisis, global transformations began to be experienced through technological solutionism (Morozov, 2013) in response to the cyclical process. From this cyclical crisis of the previous decade emerged a vast body of academic literature focused on examining changes in the modes of operation of capitalism through notions such as "digital capitalist economy" (Fuchs, 2019), "platform capitalism" (Srnicek, 2016), "techno-scientific capitalism" (Birch, 2019), and "surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff, 2019), among many others. Although these analyses are carried out under different visions, sometimes under conflicting theoretical and analytical positions, they all maintain that the forms of production and the modes of capital accumulation after the global economic crisis develop through the intensification of digitalization within the logics of capital.

As the processes of change in capitalism were taking shape in its digital age following the global economic crisis, various dynamics and forms of analog privatization of public education systems intensified in Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean. The trend of privatizing public education systems in the Global South is part of the proliferation of global education agendas that have been neoliberalizing education systems (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), which has materialized through what has been termed the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2011). Or, put another way, a global education reform movement based on various endogenous and exogenous privatization mechanisms (Ball, 2012) that has intensified the educational privatization in Latin America and the Caribbean, a process that had been expanding since the beginning of the 21st century.

From a more analytical perspective, we can differentiate between the expansion of exo-privatization dynamics in education, which unfolds through the structural privatization of educational systems, and endo-privatization dynamics, which are based on the covert privatization inherent in the daily operations and activities of schools. Specifically in this context, research focused on analyzing Public-Private Partnerships and the liberalization processes of public educational services that pass into private hands has been particularly noteworthy (Adrião, Garcia, Borghi, & Arelaro, 2012; Gentili, Frigotto, Leher & Stubrin, 2009). Another form of exoprivatization is the involvement of private political actors in shaping global educational agendas that are transforming public education systems. This includes global political actors and international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Trade Organization. Within the structural processes of exo-privatization, neoliberalization also plays a role, developing in global agendas through the influence of networks of private political actors who lead important neoliberal think tanks (Viseu & Carvalho, 2018; Saura, 2015) and are exerting a strong influence on reforms in the continent (Jarquin, 2021). More recently, the contexts of Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean have also become important centers of neoliberal experimentation through political networks of philanthropic governance (Martins & Krawczyk, 2018), which constitute another form of educational exo-privatization.

On the other hand, internal privatization relates to the ways in which neoliberalism is no longer structural but rather permeates subjectivities through choice and competition, teacher control practices, and the daily operations of schools. Specifically, in this regard, we could identify some of the many analyses in Latin America that have focused on demonstrating the logic of the quasi-market in education, based, broadly speaking, on choice and competition between families and schools. Furthermore, another way in which internal privatization penetrates schools is through the dynamics of New Public Management, which have deployed managerial logics favoring hierarchy over more democratic decision-making processes in schools (Lima, 2018). And finally, the emphasis on standardized assessments (Parcerisa and Falabella, 2019), which have come hand in hand with economic incentive systems and the culture of performativity as changes in educational policies are governed by the discourses of efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness as a means to constantly modify the work and identity of teachers.

Undoubtedly, Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean have been prominent spaces of resistance to all these pro-privatization logics of recent decades. The broad and heterogeneous current of Critical Pedagogy (McLaren, 2012), which in this context of the Global South has taken Paulo Freire as a starting point from which to articulate resistance, has produced an important legacy. In addition to the extensive academic literature produced by Critical Pedagogy on the continent, global spaces of resistance have emerged, such as the World Social Forum, which has emphasized these processes of educational privatization over the last decade, and the International Research Center Other Voices in Education. It is necessary to delve deeper into the resistance to digital capitalism in education, since, as highlighted by the analysis of the International Research Center Other Voices in Education (Ortega, Jarquín, Palomino, & Bonilla-Molina, 2021), the pandemic resulted in the 11 most important technology corporations in the world obtaining a sum of 3.2 trillion dollars in profit during the year 2020 amidst a drop in the world GDP of 4.5 trillion US dollars. Therefore, and following critical pedagogical analyses, the Critical Pedagogy movement (Peters, Jandrić & McLaren (2022)) must update itself and delve into proposals for resistance to these advances of capitalism in its digital age in education in order to defend public education. The interdisciplinary working group proposed here, "Digital Capitalism, Educational Policy, and Critical Pedagogy," is formed with the aim of critically situating these complexities in Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean, relating them to global dynamics in order to propose responses that staunchly defend public education.

The new processes of educational privatization unfolding globally in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate that the privatization of education is no longer solely analog. This is primarily due to the significant impact of contemporary capitalism's digital advancements on new forms of privatizing education systems worldwide. However, this does not mean that analog forms of educational privatization have entirely disappeared. Rather, a series of digital forms of educational privatization are emerging and becoming hegemonic globally. As the most relevant and recent research conducted in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic shows, four broad dynamics of digital educational privatization are emerging that will shape the future of public education systems. These four forms of digital educational privatization could, in a sense, be considered part of what the Global South has termed the "Fourth Industrial Revolution in Education" (Bonilla-Molina, Jarquín, and Lázaro, 2021).

On the one hand, we can point to the political networks of digital governance (Saura, Cancela & Adell, 2022). We define the political networks of digital governance as assemblages of human political actors (technology corporations, banking entities, international organizations, think-tanks, philanthropic foundations, lobbies, entrepreneurs, startups, edu-businesses?) and non-human political actors (software, apps, digital platforms, and countless technological tools based on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, the metaverse...) that unify and operate together to think, decide, configure, and implement the educational policies that are transforming schools from within.

A second dynamic of digital educational privatization relates to new educational technology markets. Analyses addressing digital platformization in education are proliferating here (Perrota, Gulson, Williamson, Witzenberger, 2021; Saura, Díez-Gutiérrez & Rivera, 2021) through interoperability and intraoperability. At the same time, analyses that specify the commercialization of data extraction and processing are also becoming part of this trend (Sadowski, 2020). Alongside this, analyses of the asetization of education are also expanding (Birch, Chiappetta & Artyushina, 2020), which, in educational policy, are focusing attention on capital accumulation by new rentiers (Komljenovic, 2021).

Another emerging trend in digital educational privatization involves the privatization of teaching work, the emergence of quasi-markets for schools, and school governance through data and platforms that permeate the daily life of schools. Hegemonic digital platforms are generating new forms of digital governance while simultaneously promoting increasingly technocratic pedagogical changes and exacerbating the deprofessionalization of teachers (Saura, Díez-Gutiérrez & Rivera, 2021; Williamson & Hogan, 2020). There are also new accountability processes through data infrastructures that intensify anticipatory governance, new forms of automation, and shifts in the determination of value in forms of knowledge, essentially due to the conversion of knowledge into digital information.

Another new form of digital educational privatization is the techno-educational imaginary (Saura, Cancela & Adell, 2022), which updates Jessop's (2010) economic imaginary. Here, we can differentiate between, on the one hand, programmatic imaginaries, which are the technological, educational, economic, and geopolitical development strategies of states, continents, international organizations, etc., deployed in the educational systems of very specific territories. On the other hand, the techno-educational imaginary of the EdTech industry refers to the economic and political images projected by private political actors in the educational technology industry (large technology corporations, tech unicorns, local edubusinesses, etc.). Their aim is to make the new technology markets they create increasingly attractive, projecting the futuristic success of education while simultaneously designing the future of humanity and machines. Some of the first global analyses that have focused on these new privatization processes in the continent, show the hegemony that various private political actors, such as the World Bank, IESALC UNESCO, Gates Foundation and Facebook are generating in the articulation of new techno-educational imaginaries for Latin America (Ortega, Jarquín, Palomino and Bonilla-Molina, 2021).

While this is happening, national education policies appear to be very weak in confronting the offensive against in-person public education by digital capitalism. This was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed a significant setback in the right to education. The new privatization model implemented in 2020 (Bonilla-Molina, 2021) transferred the responsibility for ensuring minimum learning conditions to citizens and students, as they were the ones who had to pay for data plans, access to remote connection equipment, and communication platforms. This generated odious and exclusionary stratifications between those who had access to digital-virtual connections, compared to those who could only maintain educational contact through radio or television, and even more so compared to those who could not maintain educational contact at all.

This weakness in educational policies goes far beyond the dependent and neocolonial nature of Latin American state economies, and is more appropriately linked to the epistemic gap (Bonilla-Molina, 2022) when formulating pedagogical plans and programs, since the epistemology of analysis tends to dismiss the profound impact of industrial revolution cycles on the demands of the capitalist world system on school systems, university education and professional training.

From this perspective, critical pedagogies, with their position of enunciation of resistance at the margins of the system, can make significant contributions to rethinking education in the third decade of the 21st century, from a humanist, emancipatory, liberating perspective that links pedagogical work to national and regional projects of sovereignty, social justice, redistribution of wealth and inclusion with a feminist, ecological, decolonial and anti-racist perspective.