more on chilean education protests

A New Chile is Possible: Students and a Society in Motion : Edufactory:

"This time around, however, the movement is not limited to students, nor is it exclusively focused on education. Chile is going through a crisis of legitimacy brought on by the inability of the political system inherited from the dictatorship to meet social demands. As the “Manifesto of Historians” points out, society is debating again, questioning top-down authority and enacting “forms of direct and decentralized democracy.”"

Haunts: Indignant women and girls ignite the Chilean Winter – women in and beyond the global:

"The students began their protests to challenge and change the inequalities within the educational systems and structures, inequalities that are funded, or better de-funded, by mass privatization, on one hand, and a tax structure that sends relatively little money into the schools. Most students attend grossly underfunded public universities while the wealthy few attend the very few exclusive and exclusionary private universities. At present, Chilean university education is one of the most expensive in the world. Students assume extraordinarily high debts, with 50% of them considered heavily indebted. The schools are both expensive and lousy.

As inequality has grown in Chile, so has segregation. According to some, Chile is the second most socially segregated country in the world. The rich study – and play and live — only with the rich, the poor with the poor."

Latin America, 2011: A Year Marked by Social Movements · Global Voices: 

"Images of Chilean student protests made news around the world for months. While most international media focused on the recurring clashes between protesters and the police, on social networks citizens shared analysis, reports, images and videos from the ground."

From Aljazeera:

"Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades. 

The students are demanding free education, and an end to the privatisation of their schools and universities. The free-market based approach to education was implemented by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his last days in power.  

The protests are causing a political crisis for Sebastian Pinera, the country's president. But what are the underlying issues driving the anger?

As the demonstrations in Chile coincide with protests erupting globally, Fault Lines follows the Chilean student movement during their fight in a country plagued by economic inequality."

Note: There is still a lot of confusion about the word decemtralization even in Wikipedia. In Latin America, the word decentralization was used by neoliberals who essentially privatized state functions, removing power from the public and placing that power in private hands outside of public control. Ending public schools or scattering funding to charters and vouchers and many more experiments, is a form of privatization.

I am advocating for moving power into the hands of families within the public system, what Wikipedia calls democratization. The Green Party's Ten Key Values' decentralization is still a valid tool for discussing where the power lies within a system. Words are used and misused by many people for many purposes;  Orwell wrote superbly about this. 


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