In the past few years, Chile has been swept up by mass student protests and government reform that has dismantled its structure of educational programs, among other reforms. Those at the forefront of these student protests are now approaching reform internally. Leaders in these protests, including 26-year-old Giorgio Jackson, 25-year-old Camilla Vellejo, and 26 year old Karol Cariola, are running for positions in Chile’s congress on November 17th.
These students are a part of a growing force of social reformers running for office in Chile. Union leaders and environmentalists are joining their movement and seeking political office to affect change in the political and social climate of the Chilean democracy. Though Chile has been nominally a democracy since 1990, many right-winged leaders hold an un-democratic sway in office: Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who ruled in a dictatorship until 1990, still served as a “senator for life” and many members of the armed forces are “designated senators” – allowing both to have veto power against any reform in the senate.
Jackson and his fellow protestors want to continue their fight internally because they believe there needs to be systemic change in the government: Jackson claims that students are facing “a legacy of the privatization of education, an understanding that education is not a right but something that you can purchase.” Vallejo continues to say the treatment of education as a commodity “immediately distorts the principal objective which is to educate not earn profits, as well as generates a brutal socioeconomic segmentation…in other words the children who are born poor are going to receive a poor education and will continue to be poor. ”
Protestors like Vellejo are demanding not just educational reform but a social revolution: “We realized the problem was bigger, the problem was structural.” If elected, the future of Chile’s social and political reform holds promise in regards to educational structuring and schooling systems.
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Written by Aanchal Narang