Tens of thousands of Chilean students demand educational reform
SANTIAGO (BNO NEWS) -- Tens of thousands of students and teachers on Thursday marched in the Chilean capital urging the government of President Sebastián Piñera to reform the country's public education system, el Financiero newspaper reported.
According to organizers, more than 100,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Santiago. Police, however, estimated that 80,000 people participated in the demonstration. Local media said it was the largest demonstration in the country's political history since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
Although the demonstration was mainly peaceful, a group of young people with their faces covered threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police. They retaliated with water cannons and tear gas, while other police officers on horseback clashed with demonstrators.
The president of the Student Federation of the University of Chile, Camila Vallejo, said the mobilization has now matured into a political movement. A group of opposition political leaders, union leaders and civil servants also joined the march.
The conservative government of President Piñera has rejected the students' demands. Students have been protesting this year, demanding an end to profiteering in education and increased public support.
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To be more specific, and to translate adequately this news report (I know, there are lots of untranslatable things), in Chile there is a nation-wide school voucher system that replaces public education entirely. Instead of state universities, you have shadow tolls paid by the government to universities, and they compete for student according by their results in a nationwide SAT. This system is cementing a fine-grained social segmentation like nowhere else in the world, where kids are carefully segregated by their parents’ income, and the OECD has recommended its change. Government is deaf, because Milton Friedman himself oversaw the implementation of this system in 1976, and Pinochet imposed it with weapons and murders. Piñera’s government loves Friedman’s policies, listens daily to bulletins of The Heritage Foundation, carefully translated by a local think-tank called “Libertad y Desarrollo”, and, according to OECD, it’s condemning our people to a income distribution that is worse than some Africa’s countries.
Well, students are fighting the school voucher, are fighting the tertiary education financing system (shadow toll + high tuition fees + bank loaning), and only want public education. Nothing more and nothing less. It’s logical that this demonstration has powered unrest against Piñera, and that shouldn’t surprise you. What surprises me is how deaf is Piñera, and how it denies to question the foundations of this ideologically designed system.
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