With no waste of time, the recently reelected President Michelle Bachelet of Chile and her socialist advisers have begun pushing a transformational agenda of education reforms and increased taxes that greatly expand statist intervention in the country’s mixed economy. The drive to increase state control was promised in Bachelet’s election campaign last year and in her inaugural address in March. But it was not until this week that the details were set forth, in an announcement in advance of her state of the union address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow. What Bachelet is proposing in her second term as president is a profound change in Chile’s educational system with measures that span everything from how private schools are financed to how schools and universities admit their student bodies. Behind this project is a political goal of make public schools laboratories for social integration between different social classes with the stated goal of giving children of poor families a better education. This involves a huge investment through which Chile will have to make unprecedented efforts to improve public school teachers. Many Chilean educators criticize the project as “utopian,” and the new taxes needed to finance the scheme have found strong resistance in the economic community.