This article is based on research about the relations and tensions between secondary students' subjectivities and dominant discourses as well as education policies in rural contexts in Chile (a well-known case of neoliberal policies in recent decades). Using a poststructural theoretical perspective, the qualitative study is focused on rural students' subjectivities, through the analysis of their narratives about their lives, their perceptions on secondary schooling, and their educational/labour perspectives about the future. The findings reveal the tensions between the certainty and uncertainty of a future. Specifically, of an educational and work path by which students seek to continue or diverge from the paths taken by previous generations. Here, education policies fail to offer a real upgrade in their future educational and lived conditions or aspirations. Moreover, rural students respond to the neoliberal discourse in an active attempt to de-subjectivise themselves from historical trajectories of precariousness.