The Chilean Way to Educate

 The Chilean education crisis has lasted for too long causing that today secondary and college students are disappointed and annoyed with the poor quality of education.

I remember I was at school when there was the famous Penguin Revolution. Then, the fight was for free school pass, for reforms in education law and especially to improve the quality of public education.

However, after 5 years, protests, marches and sit-ins of educational establishments have raised again, but this time in search of more. Students have realized that education has become a source of profit, and an increasingly expensive good, almost a privilege.

Governments focus the public benefits just on the poorer people. The rich are wealthy enough to pay for education without public help. Meanwhile, the middle class also has to pay for education but without being so wealthy as the rich and not so poor to receive a substantial public help; so, they must obtain a bank loan with market interest rates to pay for the high cost of a decent education that allows them in the future, with an academic degree in hand, pay the great debt that they have incurred on.

Moreover, to enter to the traditional universities (the most prestigious universities in the country) is required to have a good performance on the University Selection Test, a test that measures how good the contents of the secondary level program have been learned. This is another challenge to the more disadvantaged economically, because only the better and more expensive schools pass the contents completely, which is a barrier that perpetuates the unequal entry to the best quality education.

Public schools, which are managed by the local administration (the municipalities), are the more affected by this system, because of the low financing, the bad infrastructure, the lack of human capital of their students, the bad quality of their teachers, and the binding restrictions of the bureaucracy for the good management. These conditions put the public schools in a big disadvantage relative to the private ones, which makes students from these schools, have no alternative than to go to the expensive private universities to be able to obtain a professional degree and have better economic perspectives than their parents’, therefore they have to debt enormously to pay for their future.

There are also other things that increase the discontent, for example, that the school tariff rate of public transport doesn´t extends throughout the whole year and that the school pass is not free. Also the last earthquake left school with structural damages that has not been repaired.

In short, students with their attractive and massive demonstrations are calling on the government, particularly the Minister of Education, Joaquín Lavín, to make an educational reform that becomes reality the education as a right and that finally solve all the problems mentioned above.