Students command education separation

Education in any part of the world, or should be, not only a human right but also a strategic tool for the development of communities. So what happens when education has lost its way, or when education to economic impoverishment?

What happens when the purpose of education is not to improve the living standards of people in harmony with the environment, but to improve the efficiency and profitability of companies, despite the ecological and human damage they cause?

What happens when the strategic goals of our models of development is not equality, freedom and dignity of people, but the reproduction and growth depth of inequalities, based on the accumulation of wealth, or even the generation of new forms of slavery such as debt and drugs?

In Chile, students chose to fight

In Chile, the student movement clearly chosen to fight this process.

In our country, it's not just that we are not guaranteed human right to education in our political constitution since economic freedom has a higher priority, but the design of our education system is precisely intended to maintain and imposed liberalness economic model during reproduce the military dictatorship that began in 1973.

It is no coincidence that the set of social movements that arose in Chile, at least from 2010, to question all come our model of development.

What has happened is that people realize that this model is not able to deliver on the promises for over 30 years and deepened inequality, millions in debt and led to the profit of a few of the cost of millions.

Chile has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. According to figures from the SOL Foundation, a non-profit organization that investigations into the world of work in Chile, the inequality between rich and poor increased by 46 times since the 1980s.

Since the 1990s, the productive economic growth is at 80%, while workers' wages have only increased by 20%. Some 46% of the populations earn less than the minimum wage (less than US $ 400 dollars) and two of the three people below the poverty line employees.

The truth is that inequality has increased in Chile since put in place liberal policies and fundamental rights are now the province of the privileged few. Because they do not have enough money to live on, the workforce has been forced to borrow from private banks to education, health, food, and clothing and fund basic services for their families.

Faced with the reality that never in official speeches about our great called macro-economic policy, it seems to us intolerable that education designed to overcome such inequality, but to reproduce and to deepen.

Privatization of Education

In the 1980s, in the midst of the military dictatorship and with no popular mandate, the state to a mere subsidiary role, the market forces and resources to education and other fundamental rights to convert into profitable business propositions. Public education is abandoned, and private education has grown rapidly.

Today, public education is underfunded. State universities receive less than 15% of their budgets from the state, so families are forced to bill directly foot (US $ 30,000 per grade average), or by getting into debt (the cost of a degree could increase by 200 %).

The private system grows with no regulation. Investors from Chile and other parts of the world to inject financial capital in this large and profitable business.

As a result, education in Chile is not only one of the most expensive in the world, but the country also has one of the most segregated education systems. An OECD report showed that Chilean education consciously structured according to social class.

Education in Chile has been created for the maintenance and differentiation of social classes; we have education for the rich, for the middle class and the poor. Higher technical education produces cheap manual labor, while private universities turn out the future directors of large companies. All are separated according to their ability to pay, and the vast majority of the debt.

The purpose of privatization was not only to maintain social inequality and to destroy public education as an area of ​​social integration. It also destroyed public education aimed at producing critical citizens, who are thinking about our national reality and its injustice and active in the process of internal democratization of educational institutions.

Who are trying to destroy was the possibility that education would carry the necessary tools for students to not only a good professional but critical citizens rather than mere automatons contained in the large university-company.

It progressively eliminated civic education in public schools. Reducing the hours of teaching history, philosophy, art and music shows how our people suffer an education that focuses on neoliberals. It has deep reduce political and social awareness of students.

Students, teachers require a paradigm shift civil education was fundamental to the construction of the popular organizations in our country during the 1960s and 1970s and our own struggle.

After decades spent strengthening student politics, Chilean students in 2011 managed to not only come up with economically sound ideas to improve the financing of public education, but also to deepen understanding of the ideological bias of our education system and its tendency to social inequality .

Teachers, rectors and education workers came together and were able to demand and accumulating in the streets, paradigms shift in the Chilean education system, and a change in our society.

This paradigm shift not only implies the restoration of the constitutional guarantee of the right to education - and thus, the state will ensure free public education and a quality space for social integration - but fundamentally it has to do with the need to defend and give meaning back to the public sector, as a place for a democratic use in the generation and transfer of knowledge.

Today, new generations of students like spirit of rebellion our ancestors' life, and because of this we support the struggle of others around our continent, as our Canadian brothers, who recently managed to stop the rise in rates.

Our Puerto Rican comrades; our Colombian comrades who daily demonstrate that despite difficult circumstances and under constant persecution and threats, the order of the day is the struggle for an education that the interests of the people said.

Dominican students demanding 4% of GDP for education; Ecuadorean student movement fighting the established ideal of autonomy and student co-government in Córdoba maintains; and the Brazilian students protest because 10% of GDP invested in education.

And we, the Chilean students fighting against the free-market model by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship and today challenge the violation of human rights and proposing laws those demonstrators to the tune of three years sentence in prison for the occupation of a school or aa public plaza or obstructing traffic.

Our vision for the future of education is one where we are committed to the integration of ancient indigenous concepts through intercultural educational processes, a new post-capitalist gives civilizing vision that works in harmony with nature and the responsible and sovereign use of our limited resources and primary materials.

The development of this vision is what gives the Latin American educational process its own identity today.

* Camilla Vallejo is president of the University of Chile Student Federation. This is an edited version of her speech at the Global Leadership Summit student in September. The full speech is available here.