Chile and the communist maneuvers. The decline of public education.
A few days ago, the information went viral that the Instituto Nacional, the emblematic high school of our country, called some time ago as "the first light of the nation" and cradle of several former presidents and Chilean politicians, for the first time in its history has enrollment availability just weeks before the end of the School Admission System (SAE).
This new reality of the Instituto Nacional took over the social networks and sparked the debate: the moment of the emblematic high school reflects the serious crisis of Chilean public education, the result of violence and the constant takeovers that have marked the evolution of this in recent years. The consequence of which, finally, is that nobody wants to educate their children in an institution where the practice of the teaching process is blocked again and again by acts of violence, undermining not only the quality of the education provided, but also compromising the mental and physical safety of the students themselves.
The beginning of the end
The history of school protests in the new millennium began in 2006 with the so-called "penguin revolution", corresponding to the first mass uprising in a democratic context in favor of the "right to education" in response to the privatization of the Chilean education system. More than 400 school education establishments came to a standstill.
These mobilizations covered various demands made by the students, among which were: the repeal of educational laws, such as the Organic Constitutional Law of Education (LOCE) and Decree 524 of 1990, which regulates the Student Centers, the end of the municipalization of education, the study and reformulation of the Full School Day, a free school pass for the whole year and guaranteeing the University Selection Test (PSU) free of charge.
Of all of them, and 15 years after those massive demonstrations led by young PS militants, many of these requests have not even been touched, such as the JEC, which continues with its recognized ineffectiveness and whose reformulation has never been implemented (nor is it mentioned now, given the need to return to 2 days to reduce the agglomeration of students due to the pandemic).
It is important to remember that in its beginnings the JEC postulated that the afternoon hours should be destined to extracurricular activities and school support, which was never fulfilled, which ended up filling the students with more hours of content and a wear and tear and inefficiency of learning.
What they did achieve with the "penguin revolution" was the repeal of the LOCE, a law enacted during the military government, which establishes, among other norms, that the role of the state in education corresponds to that of a regulating and protective entity, giving almost total freedom for the establishment of educational centers, in short, allowing the "freedom of education", where private entities could create educational establishments. This freedom (which undoubtedly had shortcomings, due to the scarce supervision) ended that year, giving way to the intervention of education in our country, being the first indication that behind these protests there was an underhandedly political purpose and whose intentionality was not going to stop in the next years, since it is all part of the leftist process of leftistization of our country.
Situational Context of the Public High Schools
Since that date and as a direct witness in my role as a high school teacher in various municipal high schools in which I worked, I began to see the decline of educational institutions, not for lack of work of teachers, not for lack of municipal resources (which in some cases are scarce), not for lack of management, but for a deep fissure in the spirituality of the high school student, product of an anthropological decadence; A social and family phenomenon that has many edges, the first and most lethal being the high consumption of alcohol and drugs, not only on the part of the students, but also on the part of their parents. The students, generally abandoned young people, lacking a family environment due to their parents' consumption, are raised by grandmothers who are unable to provide for them and some of them practically alone, where the concept of respect and authority does not exist. This leads to a vicious circle where students end up on drugs and in many cases go to their high schools to stock up on drugs and have a "social life". Then, carrying their depressions, guilt and alienated minds, they became the breeding ground of the staunch left and anarchists. I still remember when a big punk-looking boy with the face of a child from a high school in Santiago told me that he was paid to vandalize and incite protests; of course he did not tell me who paid him, but he did tell me that he lived with his grandfather, a former leader of the "industrial cordons" and that he knew nothing about his parents.
In this context, it is not surprising that teachers are exhausted, with many absences (I was a substitute teacher in several high schools) and making the minimum effort in order to keep their jobs, as well as the once respected inspectors, who turn a blind eye to students who smoke marijuana with impunity in the schools: "it is not worth losing their mental health and their jobs", they say, if they will not even be able to expel students from the high schools, since "everyone has the right to education".
The managers are not much help either. They have been completely restrained by the ministerial laws. Students cannot be expelled. You can't make a student repeat (they are given thousands of chances first). You cannot place more than 10 reds in a course because the problem there would not be of the students who did not study, but of the "teacher's evaluation instrument". Then you have to make remedial, put tenths, etc.. Everything so that the student does not repeat, endorsing irresponsible behaviors. Irresponsible behaviors (often linked to laziness) and laziness that have as a cause the social problem expressed above.
It is important to emphasize that the psychological support to students is carried out with good programs, but with little budget and staff capacity, where in a high school there can be one or 2 psychologists for hundreds of students.
It is in this context that the revolutionary left found a niche to enthrone their ideas, just as they had done in the eighties and nineties in the universities of the country (which is why many of the professors of these same students are leftists and in some cases celebrate the insurrectional uprising).
Protests 2011: Testing the power
Okay, but let's go back to the protests. The mobilizations of that year began with the first marches organized by the Student Center of the Central University of Chile, following the announcement of the sale of part of the university to an economic conglomerate, being these mobilizations supported by the Confech, who joined the demonstrations on April 28 and May 12, 2011, claiming for funding and delays in the delivery of scholarships and problems with the National Student Card (TNE).
During the month of June, the demonstrations became more radical, students called for successive marches in the main cities of Chile, reaching large numbers and demanding reforms to the Chilean educational system to strengthen the role of the State in education. After a month of mobilizations and strikes, the government presented its first proposal, which was rejected again and again, until finally they opened up to the possibility of reforms to the system, such as the de-municipalization of secondary education and a constitutional change to ensure quality in education. Even so, they were not considered sufficient by the students.
It is important at this point to emphasize that the main spokespersons of the university movement during that year were the presidents of the Student Federation of the University of Chile (FECh), Camila Vallejo, and of the Student Federation of the Catholic University of Chile (FEUC), Giorgio Jackson, among others, who would later become the "new leftist camp in Congress".
During the course of the year, gradually, high school students joined the mobilizations and began to carry out takeovers in their schools, repeating the actions of the "penguin revolution", through the National Coordinating Committee of High School Students (CONES) and the Coordinating Assembly of High School Students (ACES), highly ideologized entities committed to the left, thus radicalizing the street protests where the first signs of what we saw after October 18, 2019 were glimpsed: barricades, church burnings, etc. As the mobilization grew, students from private paid schools, Technical Training Centers (CFT), Professional Institutes (IP) and private universities joined for the first time, that is, members of practically the entire Chilean educational system. Ending that year almost stopped in its entirety and demanding from high schools and teachers alternative forms of work and/or promotion of students in an absolutely irregular context.
On Sunday, August 21, a new march, this time classified as "family" was organized by the student leaders in O'Higgins Park. The meeting, also called "March of the whirlwinds", included a concert with guest bands, including Los Tres, Sol y Lluvia, Inti-Illimani and Illapu, among other leftist musical groups, ending with a version of "The people united will never be defeated", sung together by several of the invited musicians. These mobilizations were interpreted as part of a larger social movement demanding substantial reforms to the economic and political model established during the military government, causing the Piñera government (in its first presidency) to enter into a crisis that led to a drop in presidential approval and successive cabinet changes. Whoever says that behind this there was not a bias and clear political management on the part of the left must be absolutely blind, as the saying goes, there is no worse blind person than the one who does not want to see. That was the beginning of the end.
From that year on, the ACAB graffiti, the hoods, the anti-capitalist slogans, the takeovers and barricades in the vicinity of the municipal establishments, especially in those of the emblematic commune of Santiago, became generalized, to such an extent that they began to be considered as part of the "Santiago landscape", since they were repeated year after year, so much so that they became customary and natural. Emblematic was the burning and desecration of the Church of National Gratitude by hooded persons (some of whom could be glimpsed the insignia of the Liceo de Aplicación, located a few blocks away) in 2016.
Star of Chaos (symbol of anarchism) at INBA.
Arriving at the twilight
Thus, in this "getting used" to student movements no one glimpsed that the protests against the 10 pesos hike in the subway in October 2019, where high school students, led by the most extreme group of the National Institute, (which during the year, had already had several demonstrations with the so-called "white overalls", interrupting the normal functioning of the establishment and generating various struggles between students, teachers and parents) would end in the disastrous weekend of October 18, when the insurrectional escalation had its highest point, leading our country to a "before and after", in a process that becomes more irreversible every day.
There is concrete evidence of the use of the students by the left. According to Carabineros information, there are eight violent tendencies distributed in four establishments. They all stem from the collective Secundarios en Rebeldía (SER), an organization founded in 2013 hand in hand with the collectives "Darío Rebelde" (from Liceo Darío Salas) and "Aplica Praxis" (from Liceo Aplicación), two groups that bet on the so-called "street action". They are joined by the Aplícate, Acción Colectiva and Colectivo Autónomo collectives: groups made up of students with anarchist tendencies from the Liceo de Aplicaci.
