Sleeping on a tiled classroom floor, sharing cigarettes and always on the lookout for police raids, the students of Carmela Carvajal primary and secondary school are living a revolution.
It began early one morning in May, when dozens of teenage girls emerged from the predawn darkness and scaled the spiked iron fence around Chile’s most prestigious girls’ school. They used classroom chairs to barricade themselves inside and settled in. Five months later, the occupation shows no signs of dying and the students are still fighting for their goal: free university education for all.
A tour of the school is a trip into the wired reality of a generation that boasts the communication tools that feisty young rebels of history never dreamed of. When police forces move closer, the students use restricted Facebook chat sessions to mobilize. Within minutes, they are able to rally support groups from other public schools in the neighborhood.
“Our lawyer lives over there,” said Angelica Alvarez, 14, as she pointed to a cluster of nearby homes.
“If we yell: ‘Mauricio’ really loud, he leaves his home and comes over,” she said.
For five months, the students at Carmela Carvajal have lived on the ground floor, sometimes sleeping in the gym, but usually in the abandoned classrooms where they hauled in a TV, set up a private changing room and began to experience school from a different perspective.
The first thing they did after taking over the school was to hold a vote. Approximately half of the 1,800 students participated in the polls to approve the takeover, and the yays outnumbered the nays 10 to one.
Now the students pass their school days listening to guest lecturers who provide free classes on topics ranging from economics to astronomy. Extracurricular classes include yoga and salsa lessons. At night and on weekends, visiting rock bands set up their equipment and charge 1,000 pesos (US$1.93) per person to hear a live jam on the basketball court. Neighbors donate fresh baked cakes and, under a quirk of Chilean law, the government is obliged to feed students who are at school — even students who have shut down education as usual.
So much food has poured in that the students from Carmela Carvajal now regularly pass on their donations to hungry students at other occupied schools.
Municipal authorities have repeatedly attempted to retake the school, sending in police to evict the rebel students and get classes back on schedule, but so far the youngsters have held their ground.
“It was the most beautiful -moment, all of us in [school] uniform climbing over the fence, taking back control of our school. It was such an emotional moment, we all wanted to cry,” Alvarez said. “There have been 10 times that the police have taken back the school and every time we come and take it back again.”
The students have built a hyper-organized, if somewhat legalistic, world, with votes on everything including daily duties, housekeeping schedules and the election of a president and spokeswoman. The school rules now include several new decrees: no sex, no boys and no booze. That last clause has been a bit abused, the students say.
“We have had a few cases of classmates who tried to bring in alcohol, but we caught them and they were punished,” said Alvarez, who was stationed at the school entrance questioning visitors.
Alvarez, who has lived at the school for about four months, laughed as she described the punishment.
“They had to clean the bathrooms,” she said.
Carmela Carvajal is among Chile’s most successful state schools. Nearly all the graduates are assured of a place in top Chilean universities, and the school is a magnet, drawing in some of the brightest minds from across Santiago, the nation’s capital and a metropolis of 6 million.
However, the story playing out in its classrooms is just a small part of a national student uprising that has seized control of the political agenda, wrongfooted conservative Chilean President Sebastian Pinera and called into question the free-market orthodoxy that has -dominated Chilean politics since the Pinochet era.
The students are demanding a return to the 1960s, when public university education was free. Current tuition fees average nearly three times the minimum annual wage, and with interest rates on student loans at 7 percent, the students have made financial reform the centerpiece of their uprising.
At the heart of the students’ agenda is the demand that education be recognized as a common right for all, not a “consumer good” to be sold on the open market.
FRUSTRATIONS: One in seven youths in China and Indonesia are unemployed, and many in the region are stuck in low-productivity jobs, the World Bank said Young people across Asia are struggling to find good jobs, with many stuck in low-productivity work that the World Bank said could strain social stability as frustrations fuel a global wave of youth-led protests. The bank highlighted a persistent gap between younger and more experienced workers across several Asian economies in a regional economic update released yesterday, noting that one in seven young people in China and Indonesia are unemployed. The share of people now vulnerable to falling into poverty is now larger than the middle class in most countries, it said. “The employment rate is generally high, but the young struggle to
ENERGY SHIFT: A report by Ember suggests it is possible for the world to wean off polluting sources of power, such as coal and gas, even as demand for electricity surges Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, a new analysis said. Global solar generation grew by a record 31 percent in the first half of the year, while wind generation grew 7.7 percent, according to the report by the energy think tank Ember, which was released after midnight yesterday. Solar and wind generation combined grew by more than 400 terawatt hours, which was more than the increase in overall global demand during the same period, it said. The findings suggest it is
IN THE AIR: With no compromise on the budget in sight, more air traffic controllers are calling in sick, which has led to an estimated 13,000 flight delays, the FAA said Concerns over flight delays and missed paychecks due to the US government shutdown escalated on Wednesday, as senators rejected yet another bid to end the standoff. Democrats voted for a sixth time to block a Republican stopgap funding measure to reopen government departments, keeping much of the federal workforce home or working without pay. With the shutdown in its eighth day, lines at airports were expected to grow amid increased absenteeism among security and safety staff at some of the country’s busiest hubs. Air traffic controllers — seen as “essential” public servants — are kept at work during government shutdowns, but higher numbers
Elvis Nghobo tried to get into four different professional schools in Cameroon, but could not make it. Frustrated, the 34-year-old turned to selling food at a market in Yaounde, the country’s seat of power. Nghobo blames his woes on what he calls a corrupt education system that favors children of the elite. As the central African country prepares for Sunday’s presidential election, he said he would not be heading out to vote. He called the results a foregone conclusion for 92-year-old Paul Biya, the world’s oldest president, who has ruled for Nghobo’s entire life. “He is already too old to govern, and it’s boring
RSS