Chilean students 'occupy' school and run it by themselves
Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.
“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.
“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”
After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.
Holy shit. This is fucking awesome.
reblogging myself again because I can’t get over how awesome this is.
Chilean students 'occupy' school and run it by themselves
Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.
“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.
“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”
After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.
Holy shit. This is fucking awesome.
(Source: actanonlemons)
Chile remembers its 9/11
Thousands of Chileans have marched in the capital Santiago to remember the more than 3,000 people killed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that was launched 38 years ago with a military coup on September 11, 1973.
Organised by a group of relatives of those killed, the march on Sunday led to a memorial erected at a cemetery to commemorate the victims of Pinochet’s 17-year long regime.
They marched peacefully through the streets, unable to approach the presidential palace La Moneda because of the tight police cordon.
Salvador Allende, the first and only Marxist to come to power in Chile through a popular vote, died at the palace when military forces surrounded it during the coup. He is believed to have committed suicide.
The march in his memory and those of the dictatorship’s victims ended, however, with clashes near the cemetery, where a group of men began to confront the police guarding La Moneda.
The 1973 Chilean coup d’état was a watershed event of the Cold War and the history of Chile. On Tuesday 11 September 1973, the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d’état organised by the Chilean military and endorsed by the United States. A military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet took control of the government, composed of the heads of the Air Force, Navy, Carabineros (police force) and the Army. Pinochet later assumed power and ended Allende’s democratically elected Popular Unity government.
During the air raids and ground attacks that preceded the coup, Allende gave his last speech, in which he vowed to stay in the presidential palace, where he died. After the coup, Pinochet established a military dictatorship that ruled Chile until 1990; it was marked by severe human rights violations. A weak insurgent movement against the Pinochet government was maintained inside Chile by elements sympathetic to the former Allende government.
La cruzada anticomunista gringa en chilito, gracias a los burgueses criollos que se hasta hoy se llenan la boca con su democracia de la propiedad privada
Yes.
This is the kind of 9/11 post I want to see.
