In July of 2005, after the Senate approved a series of reforms to the Chilean Constitution, President Ricardo Lagos declared that the transition to democracy had finally – and successfully – ended. Although the assertion was still debatable – since the reforms had not touched the electoral system created by the dictatorship, nor the neoliberal logics entrenched in the
constitution – these modifications were indeed some of the more profound ones this legal text had experienced since 1980.xv While the country experienced these significant, but still moderate, political changes, schools were undergoing a similar shift. In 1998, the Ministry of Education eliminated the Civics class and moved from a civic education paradigm to a
citizenship education one, distributing its lessons throughout the whole school curriculum (Cox 2006). The modification was later supported by the results of the 1999 IEA Civic Education
71
study, which showed Chilean students socialized in the previous curriculum fared worse than the average international student when tested for civic knowledges, skills and attitudes. In 2004, a presidential Citizenship Education Committee was called for by the Ministry of Education in order to propose “una visión fundada de los nuevos requerimientos de la ciudadanía
democrática, así como criterios y medidas de mejoramiento de la formación ciudadana en la experiencia escolar”50 (Comisión Formación Ciudadana 2004, 10) . In its final report, the commission declared that “el currículo chileno de formación ciudadana estaba ya en 2004 al
día con las mejores practicas internacionales, superando lo meramente cognitivo”51 (Mardones 2015, 148) and pointed to gaps in the implementation of citizenship education, but left schools with no concrete policies to address them.
However, the most important educational changes of these years did not come from state institutions but from the streets. In the context of gradual changes in a landscape of still
predominant neoliberal educational policies, the Revolución Pingüina erupted. Revolución
Pingüina – or “Penguin Revolution,” in direct reference to the traditional black and white
uniform worn by Chilean high schoolers – was the name given to a series of high school student protests that occurred all over Chile during 2006. This was not the first student movement the
Concertación governments faced: in 2000, the main high school students’ political organization,
FESES, was replaced by the Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios (ACES), which the following year led a series of street protests demanding a state-mandated differential public transport fare for students (Borri 2016). However, the strength and size of the Revolución
Pingüina took most political actors by surprise, in what was “the most significant set of
50 A well-informed vision of the new requirements for democratic citizenship, as well as criteria and actions to
improve citizenship education throughout the school experience.
51 The Chilean citizenship education curriculum was already in 2004 up to date with the best international
72
demonstrations in Chile since the return of democracy in 1990” (Bellei and Cabalin 2013, 112). The movement’s original demands included the provision of free transportation passes, the elimination of the PSU fees, and the improvement of precarious public school facilities all over the country. As time went on, protesters focused their discourse on the entrenched inequality of the Chilean educational system and made the LOCE the main target of their actions (Bellei and Cabalin 2013).
The movement’s actions had several consequences. Facing this massive and widely supported social movement in the first year of her presidency, Michelle Bachelet – the first woman to be elected President in Chile, and also a Concertación leader – decided on a strategy of dialogue and quick responses. A day after a national strike called by the pingüinos – in which more than 600,000 citizens participated – Bachelet answered several of the students’ demands, including a reform to the LOCE – which was later repealed – and the conformation of two presidential committees for education, in which students’ delegates would participate (Borri 2016). Later in the same month, the government also modified the decree regulating student governments. Since the Pinochet dictatorship had repressed and persecuted student governments in order to neutralize any opposition, one of the first measures of the Aylwin government had been to guarantee their existence, which it did by a decree signed on April 20th, 1990. However, in yet another example of the “marketing of democracy” implemented by the Concertación governments (Paley 2001), this decree reflected an understanding of citizenship education as a developmentalist and conflict-free process (Dagnino 2007; Taft 2011). Its first article declared that student governments were organizations formed by all students of any high school, and that its aim was:
…servir a sus miembros, en función de los propósitos del establecimiento y dentro de las
73
reflexivo, el juicio crítico y la voluntad de acción, de formarlos para la vida democrática, y de prepararlos para participar en los cambios culturales y sociales.52 (Ministerio de Educación Pública 1990).
On June 21, 2006, as a result of the Penguin Revolution, the decree was reformed and the sentence “en función de los propósitos del establecimiento y dentro de las normas de
organización escolar”53 was removed. A new subsection was also added at the end of the decree’s first article, stating that “En ningún establecimiento se podrá negar la constitución y
funcionamiento de un Centro de Alumnos”54 (Ministerio de Educación 2006). Although this was an important victory, the dialogue and quick-response strategy of the government was effective in that it played off of the internal tensions among the student movement and thus furthered its demobilization (Borri 2016). By the end of 2006, new protests were severely repressed by the government, and by the beginning of the following year, the pingüinos’ movement had almost completely disappeared from the public arena.
In 2010, Sebastián Piñera became the first right-wing President democratically elected in Chile since 1958. Running on a platform explicitly promising to deepen “la libre competencia en
todos los mercados”55 (Piñera 2009, 31), Piñera proposed a higher education reform in 2011 which would “make the allocation of public resources more dependent upon performance indicators and upon increased competition” between public and private universities (Salinas and Fraser 2012, 20). In response to this, tens of thousands of college students went to the streets to protest. Led by the Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile or CONFECH – a democratic
organization that has united most Chilean college students’ federations since 1984 – the protests
52 To serve its members, according to the purposes of the school and within the rules of school organization, as a
means to develop in them reflective thinking, critical judgment and willingness to act, to train them for democratic life, and to prepare them to participate in cultural and social changes.
53 According to the purposes of the school and within the rules of school organization. 54 No school may deny the creation and operation of a student government.
74
soon coalesced in a new social movement: the Chilean Student Movement. Their slogan was: “Educación Gratuita y de Calidad para Todos”56 (Bellei and Cabalín 2013). High school students were also relevant participants of this movement, mainly through their own student governments and high school student political organizations such as ACES and the newly created Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios (CONES). The movement was at first aimed against the neoliberal educational policies entrenched both at school and university levels. However, it soon advanced towards a broader critique of the neoliberal model implemented in Chile, arguing for other changes, including a comprehensive tax reform and a new constitution (Stromquist and Sanyal 2013).
One among several Latin American social movements emerging in the last decades against neoliberal policies (Almeida and Cordero Ulate 2015), the Chilean Student Movement stood out for two main reasons. One was its wide repertoire of contention. Although its backbone was the street demonstration – with its most massive protests reaching hundreds of thousands of attendants – the Chilean Student Movement mixed more traditional contentious political actions – such as occupations and hunger strikes – with more innovative ones, like collective artistic performances and the use of websites and social media (Stromquist and Sanyal 2013; García and Aguirre 2016). The second reason it stood out was the relationship the Chilean Student
Movement established with the state. While other social movements in the region tried to gain access to the state (Fernandes 2010; Cerruti and Grimson 2013), the Chilean Student Movement took a different road: that of aiming to change state policies while maintaining distance from the state itself. Including in its ranks several former pingüinos, this student movement remained distrustful of state institutions and wary of making the mistakes that they believed demobilized
75
their predecessors in 2006 (von Bullow and Bidegain Ponte 2015). However, after achieving some of its first victories, the Chilean Student Movement did not dissolve. Its strategy was that of negotiation combined with mobilization and, through it, this social movement has become a relevant political actor during recent years (Salinas and Fraser 2012).
The effectiveness of the Chilean Student Movement’s strategy was clear in 2014, when Michelle Bachelet was elected President of Chile for the second time, now as the candidate of a new and more progressive coalition called Nueva Mayoría – which included all former
Concertación parties, plus the Communist Party – and running on a platform based on several of
the movement’s demands. As part of a series of policies attempting to eradicate the dominant neoliberal dynamics of the Chilean state, the Bachelet government proposed a comprehensive educational reform. This reform was comprised of four main pillars. The first was the Teacher Career Law, which would improve the training, salaries and working conditions of school teachers. Second was the Higher Education Law, which would regulate higher education
institutions in order to assure their quality, as well as guarantee that college would be free for all accepted students. Next was the Inclusion Law, which would prohibit admissions processes in schools financed totally or partially with public funds, as well as forbid charging school fees to the parents of their students. Finally, there was the New Public Education Law, which would transfer all public schools from local municipalities to state specialized, decentralized and territorialized institutions called Local Educational Services. Further, in October of 2015, Bachelet presented a project to replace the 1980 Constitution. Suggesting that most of the country did not have the “herramientas”57 and information required to fully participate in this constituent process, the Bachelet government ambiguously named the first stage of its project as
57 Tools.
76
a process of “Educación cívica y constitucional,”58 although these terms were not defined clearly (Gobierno de Chile 2015). As part of this process, the government also passed Law Nº 20.911 – also known as the Citizenship Formation Law – mandating the implementation of Citizenship Education Plans in all schools in the country and the creation of a new class mandatory for all 11th and 12th graders: the Citizenship Education class. All of these proposed laws wreaked havoc among politicians, stoking some of the most heated educational discussions in the country since the Allende’s presidency.
2.5 Conclusions
The history of Chilean public schooling is, in a way, also the history of citizenship education in Chile, and vice versa. In this chapter, I have argued that public schooling in Chile was born with the objective of educating citizens. Although the kind of citizens required by state actors changed throughout history, this main objective remained (and remains) at the core of the Chilean educational system. Further, I also showed that students have not only been passive receptors of these educational policies and practices, but have engaged with them in different ways, including resisting and protesting them in both their schools and in the streets. Students are not only affected by state projects, but their educational practices also become part of their relationship with the state as civil society members, and of the production of the state itself (Mitchell 2006[1999]). Tracing these processes across time, I have illustrated how the “kinds” of citizenship promoted by Chilean public high schools in the last two centuries have changed but, more important, how the actors I am studying in these pages were, first and foremost, engaging in a historical process, by taking into account the sediments of the past while making bids for possible futures (Varenne 2008).
58 Civic and Constitutional Education.
77
Chilean high school students certainly had a lot to take into account by the beginning of 2017. As previously mentioned, the Chilean Student Movement did not disappear after the Bachelet educational reform was announced; to the contrary, college and secondary students kept demonstrating in the streets as a way to make their voices heard in this reform’s design and implementation. By March of 2017, the Teacher Career Law and the Inclusion Law had already been approved. However, only the first was completely implemented, and politicians from both sides of the aisle were proposing to modify the second one in ways that could curtail its original intentions. The Higher Education Law and New Public Education Law projects were still being discussed in Congress, and government officials believed both would be approved that year (“Mineduc Espera Tabajar con Más Rapidez” 2017). Students seemed to be less confident about this – on March 5, the news portal Biobío Chile reported that college students were already organizing a demonstration for April, in order to protest the educational reform’s delayed approbation (Delgado 2017). The political and educational landscapes were already agitated. It was in this context that I started my fieldwork at the Liceo José María Muñoz Hermosilla.
78