Abstract
A democratizing and decentralized experience of educational change based on experimental education is analyzed. This experience integrated training, cultural and health aspects, the participation of the community and the integral support of the State to children and young people of the rural world to overcome poverty and marginality conditions. The experimental Plan was an attempt of social regulation consistent with the import substitution development model and the democratization of social relations, but that it did not foresee the resistance of local and national conservative sectors who blocked its execution by seeing it as a threat to the rural social order of the time. It also evidences the historical difficulties to develop a decentralized and territorial education policy in Chile, contributing to reflect on the current reorganization of the public education system in administrative units and based on territorial management, called Local Education Services, aimed at eliminating the neoliberal administrative decentralization.
Educational reforms; Decentralization; Pedagogical experimentation; Democratization