Five years ago, and by a ‘curious set of chances’, I ended up in a casual talk held among journalists and the Mexican chancellor Jorge Castañeda, in the lobby of a downtown hotel in Santiago. This was happening while Mexican President, Vicente Fox, was on official visit to Chile.
In what I recall to be an unexpected and momentary lapse of truth, Castañeda affirmed that local authorities had recognized to him their failure in diminishing the outrageous social inequities of the country, ‘but evidently, they are not going to say this in public’, said Castañeda in a real master class of democracy.
‘Now, they (the Chilean authorities, that is) ‘proceeded Castañeda ‘ are planning a reform to education as a way to diminish this gap, and that is the experience we intend to collect’.
The educational reform in Chile was presented by mid nineties as the final solution to the economic inequity in distribution, which in the Chilean case is, along with Brazil and Guatemala, one of the worst in the region, according to ECLAC (Economic Commission For Latin America and the Caribbean).
Built on two major bases, increasing the number of teaching hours and a methodological change in the way of teaching ‘ this reform was put to test this year when some of its results began to appear. And it was the international test known as TIMMS brought bad news. Held during 1995, 1999 and 2003 in approximately 40 countries, it said that nearly 60% of Chilean primary students don’t have the minimum of mathematical knowledge, and that 44% are in the same situation on sciences, reaching a shameful 39th position.
At a more local level, the SIMCE test, which evaluates knowledge on math and language for 4th and 8th graders, taken last year, also proved that equity on learning is an ideal as far from reality as authorities are willing to admit it.
The truth is that this so called reform ended up being an unexpected economic boom for construction companies, by far the greatest winners of the process: an average school required for the reform costs over a million dollars, and thousands are needed, since half the schools in Chile still have two different regimes, with some students attending classes in the mornings, and the other half going in the afternoons.
The assault that took place this last Monday in the Pedagógico (the pedagogic institute, the place where future teachers are trained) by a large amount of police men’”guns and all, was seen on TV and the media (which looked more like an assault of marines to an Al Qaeda cell’ reminded us all that the Concertación (the name on the ruling coalition) ‘has also taken care’of College education.
It is really a milestone in the long process of this center-left government to change the former system of student credits. Before, it was the State who loaned the money for the few fortunate ones to study at university. Now, this money will come from the banks, and these organizations will be able to decide if someone can o cannot study, depending on how profitable their degree will be in the market.
Students, as well as teachers have publicly rejected this privatization initiative, passed as law in record time in Congress, thanks to Sergio Bitar, Minister of Education, who is by the way a former political prisoner that spent some time in a concentration camp in Dawson Island- and who congratulated the police men that assaulted El Pedagogico.
According to figures provided by the OECD, public college or public university in developed countries have a state share of income of 80%, but in Chile the share is just 18%. And, if the budget on education in developed countries reaches 1.2% of GDP, for Chile is only a 0.3%. Education is supposed to be a basic item on the way to finally becoming a developed country.
One of the main ideologists of the ruling coalition, the ultra- liberal José JoaquÃn Brunner, explained the new ideal in the press, few days ago: ‘We need to leave behind us these out-of-date conceptions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ (education system). We have to assume the new challenge of assuring the public function of college education in general’¦reinforce research activities and development in a close collaboration with the productive areas’, he said.
This is a plan that for intellectuals as Humberto Maturana, National Sciences Prize, puts Universities to serve the interests of the Market, ‘something that most of the time is totally opposed to national interests and puts the emphasis on a market-like competition and environmental depredation instead of the construction of a collaborative society’.
In the Sunday edition of ClarÃn, the argentine newspaper, a Chilean senator, socialist Carlos Ominami said that the secret of the success for the Concertación ‘it’s our applying strictly to the rules of IMF and the World Bank (‘¦) something they (the WB) like to quote as an example’.
This has transformed Chile into ‘teacher’s pet’. But conclusions are as evident as they are troubling.
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