Chile's Next March of the Penguins

In Chile, large-scale protests were few and far between after the restoration of democracy in 1990. Apathy was king. But this generation of Chilean “chiquillos,” or kids, is proving to be very different. Some of the first young people here to have grown up free of the repressive 17-year-long Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, they have ditched their PlayStation video games and Internet chat rooms and are challenging the inequalities in Chilean schools.

This month, students are adopting a new form of protest that hits their schoolmasters where it hurts the most — their purse strings. They are simply not answering “present” during school roll call. They attend their classes, but by not participating in attendance counts they are hurting school subsidies. Why? Under the present system, municipal governments are given their subsidy according to how many students attend class.

In June 2006, coordinating their protests through email, blogs and cell phones, hundreds of thousands of Chilean students boycotted class and physically occupied more than 300 schools around the country in protest. The largest student protest in the country’s history, it was popularly dubbed the “Penguin Revolution,” named for the students' black and white uniforms. The “penguins” successfully forced Chile to move to enact major reforms to its educational policies.

But once again, critics, which include the National Teachers Union, say the new education legislation about to come up for a vote in Chile’s Congress bears little resemblance to student demands three years ago. The education bill has been weakened by political compromise in the intervening period.

At the root of Chile’s continuing education problem is inequity. While Chile wins worldwide praise for reducing poverty over the past two decades, there has been much slower progress with its rich-poor gap, the 14th worst in the world. And because Chile’s public schools operate under a de-centralized plan — with municipalities financing education instead of the central government — youths who grow up in richer areas have access to schools with better education resources. The situation is worse still if you compare with private schools, which spend as much as five times more per student than state schools. As Simon Carrera, a senior at the Santiago high school National Institute who is participating in the protests, recently explained to GlobalPost: "We want education to be the same for students everywhere, and that’s only possible if the Education Ministry manages the system and distributes the resources equally."

Photo courtesy of Info_Pinwinos.