Sebastián Piñera makes his way to Congress (photo: Presidencia de Chile)

Protesters gathered at the congress headquarters to demand free education, the protection of natural resources, and a new constitution. Before the arrival of Piñera, members of the Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) displayed little hope as they declared: “it will be a predictable speech”.

Beatriz Michell, a Telesur correspondent, said that the social groups were protesting “the numerous social problems that the government of Sebastián Piñera has failed to address, including education, health and the controversial fishing law.”

The speech is held every 21st May for all presidents, and represents Piñera’s last as Chile’s leader, before the upcoming 17th November elections, which Piñera is barred from running in according to the constitution.

Spokesperson for the Confederation of Chilean Students, Mario Domínguez, demanded of the President: “For once, listen to the citizens and their demands, there is an urge to reform the way resources are used in Chile in order to guarantee human rights, such as free and valid public education.” The University of Valparaíso announced prior to the protests that they would be supporting the students in their uprising today.

Students have been demanding changes to the country’s education system since 2011, which despite being regarded as one of the best in South America, is only funded 25% by the state, leaving a 75% dependence on funding from students and their families.

The state guarantees free education at only the primary school level. Chile’s current education system stems from the national system implemented during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Pinochet heavily reduced the role of the state after enforcing the Constitutional Law of Education reform in 1990, leaving the state as solely a regulator, with education controlled by the private sector.

Paraguayan school children from the Chamacoco community in Fuerte Olimpo, Paraguay. (Photo: Michele Molinari)

Over 50% of school children in Paraguay fail to complete the nine years of basic education, according to an official report carried out by the Programme to Promote Education Reform in Latin America and The Caribbean (Preal).

The report revealed that a large part of the Paraguayan population does not have access to formal education and that only three out of 10 pupils who entered first grade in 1999 managed to see out the full nine years until 2007.

Paraguay has one the lowest rates of students attending secondary school in Latin America. A large number of 13 to 17 year olds are also not enrolled in the level of education that corresponds to their age.

According to estimates based on the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, approximately 60,000 children aged between five and 11 years old did not have the option of attending school in 2010, due to the poor educational infrastructure of the country.

The study also showed that there are currently over 170,000 adolescents aged between 12 and 17 out of school. However, officials say these numbers are slowly decreasing.

The Preal report is the first in Paraguay and aims to monitor the progress, quality, and equity of the national education.

President elect Horacio Cartes has stated that it is seeking to implement an interactive education policy and an improved teacher training system. Cartes has also said that his main goal is to increase the skill level within the labour market, “increasing know-how among young Paraguayans and beginning a new era for education in the country.”

Students protest the Chilean education system in Santiago, Chile.

More than 150,000 protesters marched through Chile’s capital yesterday in a bid to denounce the state education system.

The march, which also took place in about a dozen other cities around the country, began in Santiago’s Plaza Italia at 11am. Although relatively peaceful for the most part, the protest turned violent when police used tear gas to diffuse the crowd around Estación Mapocho.

“If we didn’t have these marches, we wouldn’t be able to talk about education, health, and justice,” protester Nito Rojas told local publication, The Santiago Times.

“We are marching because we want free and quality education,” said Valentina Ibañez, a university student, to the same publication. “Education should be equal for everyone, it should be free — we all have the same rights.”

Shortly before 2pm, the Carabineros, the national police force, used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowds. Other skirmishes also broke out between masked protesters and police in other locations, with reports showing over 100 people were arrested.

Students in Chile have been engaged in protests over education reform for several years, with several mass demonstrations since May 2011.

Member of the Movement in the Metropolitan Cathedral (Photo: MPLD)

Around 200 supporters of the Movimiento Popular La Dignidad (MPLD) took over the Metropolitan Cathedral on Tuesday morning at about 10am to protest the subsidies given to local private Catholic schools and demand that the investments be put into public education instead. The protesters displayed flags and posters and played on drums during the protest inside the iconic church.

“Year after year the budget is lowered for public schools and the money channelled towards private and denominational schools is increased. We are trying to highlight this and begin to reverse it somehow,” representative Patricio Torras told Perfil.com.

The church was chosen as the location for the protest because the primary recipients of the subsidies given to private schools are religiously affiliated.

“The Macri government insists on pursuing its policy of emptying and privatising public education. Today the Movimiento Popular La Dignidad is present in this fight to denounce, expose and resist the advance of unpopular policies and enterprises,” read a statement from the organisation.

An organiser told Clarín that the protests would continue “until the city government gives us a response.”

Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri with Deputy Mayor María Eugenia Vidal and Education Minister Esteban Bullrich (photo by Sandra Hernández-gv/GCBA)

Schools in the city and province of Buenos Aires, as well as most other provinces, opened today as per the school calendar. However, the conflict over this year’s salary increases continues in many parts of the country.

“Every year, it is a very happy moment when the school year starts. It was achieved thanks to a good dialogue with the teachers” said Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri as he inaugurated the start of the 2013 school term.

The city’s teachers’ unions decided yesterday, in assemblies, to initiate the school year this morning after accepting Macri’s proposal to increase salaries between 26 and 29%. A teacher’s basic wage is set to increase from $3,550 in March to $4,200 in July.

Only one union out of 17 rejected the official proposal. The Association of Middle and High Education (Ademys), rejected the offer considering that “it is very far from the percentage of inflation recognised by Macri”.

For Eduardo López, General secretary of Education workers (UTE), the increase in porteño teachers’ wages “is the minimum to start classes, but is nowhere near enough”. Moreover, UTE announced a mobilisation on 12th march to demand better financing for education.

In the province of Buenos Aires, after 48 hours of strikes due to continued disagreement over teachers’ wages, classes eventually started too. However the conflict is not over, as no agreement has been reached. Daniel Scioli, governor of Buenos Aires Province, called for a meeting with the teachers’ unions this afternoon – although expectations remain low.

“We will attend the meeting because we are responsible. We want a substantial offer, that comes close to our demands. If not, we will take forceful measures next week” warned Roberto Baradel, general secretary of the United Union of Education Workers of Buenos Aires (SUTEBA). Teachers and other state workers have called for a protest tomorrow at the house of the province of Buenos Aires in the city of buenos Aires.

Teachers’ strikes continue in the province of Entre Ríos. In Santa Fe, classes began today but teachers announced a two-day strike for next week.

Mexico’s union head Elba Esther Gordillo was arrested last night for allegedly embezzling over US$156m from union funds.

Elba Esther Gordillo (photo by Gustavo Benítez/Wikipedia)

Gordillo, who heads up the 1.5 million-member Mexican teachers’ union, National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), was arrested at Toluca airport on suspicions of stealing funds for personal expenses, including California residences and cosmetic surgery, the country’s attorney general announced last night.

Gordillo’s arrest comes only two days after Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto promulgated the new education law, which will take away some of the union’s control over managing the recruitment and administration systems in the country’s schools. Instead, the new law intends to give some of the power back to the state. Her arrest also comes a day before a planned union meeting to challenge the new educational policy.

The SNTE was initially in favour of passing the education bill, which was passed by Congress in December 2012. However, the union later changed tack with Gordillo announcing that the new law would jeopardise teachers’ jobs and could spark the beginning of private education in Mexico.

The Argentine national government confirmed this morning that it will not reopen wage negotiations over teacher salaries despite today’s strike.

Alberto Sileoni, the federal minister of education explained, “We cannot reopen the national wage negotiations. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but we had one month to debate the issue.”

Education Minister taking questions (Photo: Courtesy Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social)

Due to continued disagreement over teachers’ wages, many schools have not reopened as scheduled today, barring about seven million students from restarting class. In fact, schools are only open across seven out of Argentina’s 24 provinces. The teachers from the unopened schools are currently striking in hopes that the national wage benchmark will be lifted from the decided increase of 22%.

In Argentina, teachers’ wage standards are based on a non-binding national benchmark and are implemented on a provincial level.

The main teachers’ union, the Confederation of Education Workers of Argentina (CTERA) has been vocal throughout the labour dispute. The group’s leader, Stella Maldonado, commented that today’s strike is a “political strike,” because, “what we are discussing is a very political question, as it has to do with the state collecting funds and how it distributes its resources.” She asserted that that the wage discussions in fact, “are not discussions at all.”

Maldonado further stated that Buenos Aires province governor Daniel Scioli “has made the education crisis worse… with incorrect methods and weak, defective management.”

The current teachers’ strike includes suspension of all duties and is anticipated to last from this morning until Wednesday. The strike has been endorsed by five national workers’ unions, CTERA, the Union of Argentine Teachers (UDA), the Association of Technical Teachers (AMET), the Confederation of Argentine Educators (CEA) and the Argentine Union of Private School Teachers (SADOP) in rejection of the newly established increment to increase wages of 22%. It is the second major teachers’ strike under current president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

IdeaMe is an online platform, which helps creators, be they inventors, artists, or designers, among others, to finance their projects through crowd funding. The Indy features and promotes one project every week, with the aim of helping the creators finance and achieve their dreams.

As a schoolboy, I remember hearing a science teacher selling his subject with the sentence “science is everywhere”. I remember rolling my eyes at the vague, throwaway statement and thinking science is not everywhere. Science is not in my ham sandwich. Yes, scientific processes may have taken place to produce certain ingredients, but science is not physically in there, I’m not eating a science sandwich.

Science display for school children (courtesy of EduCienciaVirtual)

Instead, I think of science as being one of the methods by which we can better understand the world around us. And Klaus Jaffe, founder of the initiative EduCienciaVirtual agrees.

According to Jaffe, a former professor at the Universidad Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Latin America is one of the most backward regions in the world in terms of scientific development. On his Ideame page, Jaffe recognises that “science is arguably the most important factor in propelling modern economic development”. A country’s economic success often correlates to its investment and development in science. Yet, Latin America, on the whole, does not have money to invest in promoting education in science. In fact, the region, as is the case in other parts of the world, is producing fewer and fewer scientists and science teachers every year. It is against this backdrop that the academic from Caracas, came up with his EduCienciaVirtual project.

The solution that Jaffe has come up with exploits the “globalisation of modern society and the development of information technology” in order to provide teachers and students with the modern science teaching tools that exist worldwide today. The aim of EduCienciaVirtual is to be an online resource that provides people with free access to existing educational programs, videos, books, games and experiments, all to do with science.

The first two stages of Jaffe’s five-phase plan have already been completed. The former professor is appealing for help in completing the third stage. The EduCienciaVirtual website has already been created and contains initial high-quality educational programmes. It has also been tested in various poor rural classrooms in Venezuela. But now Jaffe needs both collaborative and financial support to complete the website. In order to find, evaluate and upload existing educational material that is not yet included, Jaffe is appealing for funds and expertise. He invites you “to participate in the building of Spanish-speaking America’s future”.

Pooling and sharing existing scientific educational resources on the internet, all for free. It certainly sounds like a good idea to me. If Jaffe’s project succeeds, perhaps science really will be everywhere after all.

To donate and help this project become a reality visit the EduCienciaVirtual ideame page at http://idea.me/proyecto/618/educienciavirtual.

Men and women convicted of terrorism, sexual violence, or drug trafficking offences, will be banned from teaching in public and private schools in Peru.

“The law establishes extraordinary measures for teaching and administrative staff in schools, universities, and other superior educations centres, public and private, convicted or implicated in offences of justifying or supporting terrorism, against sexual liberty, and drug trafficking,” read the official statement released by the government. The statement also established that those concerned would be “be permanently separated and prevented from service in educational institutions public and private, including Police and Military schools.”

The law was unanimously approved by the Peruvian congress and therefore bypassed the usually necessary second vote. The law also proposes to create a register with the names of those convicted for the offences considered by the law.

Deputy Marisol Pérez Tello, who is president of the Commission for Justice and Human Rights said that the Ministry of Education had 30 days to make sure that none of the schools and education institutions currently employ people convicted for the crimes in question.

“It is a very important step for the Justice Commission to stop teachers from using the dependence students have to them to promote the folly of terrorism in young people,” explained Pérez Tello.

The Peruvian congress will also debate in the next few days on the Denial Law, that would establish prison sentences for people denying the crimes committed by the Shining Path guerrilla during the last decades of the 20^th century. The issue has been on the political and legislative agenda in the last few months after the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef), a group close to the Shining Path, demanding the amnesty of those involved in the civil war between Shining Path and the government in view of a return of the organisation to politics.

The state backed Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (CVR), created in 2001, had released in its final report in 2003 that Shining Path was responsible of over half of the 70 000 known victims of the conflict.

Argentina is regionally considered a country with high levels of human capital and good quality of education. Its history of high literacy rates and a strong emphasis on education in the national budget confirm such a notion.

In the last century, the works of renowned writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Ernesto Sábato were exposed to the world with great recognition, enhancing the country’s reputation as a cultivated nation. Argentina also educated three Nobel Prize winners in the sciences: Luis Federico Leloir, Bernardo Houssay, and César Milstein, the highest number in Latin America.

Empty Classroom, by Beatrice Murch

More recently, during the first week of September, the minister of education released the results of a national survey that states that 90% of Argentines read at least a quarter of an hour weekly, and more than half of the population does it five times a week. International organisations also reveal some impressive figures regarding human development. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Argentina has the second best Human Development Index in the region after Chile, occupying place number 45 in the world ranking. One of its components is the Education Index, which in the Argentine case is the highest in Latin America.

However, if you happen to be an Argentine or to live in Argentina nowadays then you may know about the high drop-out rates and the major disparities between public and private schools, which reflects an increasing educational inequality. You may also have heard about the poor performances of students in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, and the on-going confrontations between students and governments leading to the taking over of schools and the suspension of classes.

Argentina might have been ahead of the game in coverage of schooling and development of knowledge. However, today there are several elements deeply affecting the quality of instruction that call into question the traditional view of Argentina’s coverage and quality of education.

Sociologist Guillermina Tiramonti, researcher in education at FLACSO (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences) and professor at La Plata National University gave us her take on this matter in order to shed some light on this contraposition.

“Argentina was one of the first countries in the region to develop a successful public education and, together with the growth of the economy at the time, it was able to incorporate most of the society into the labour market. This gave rise to a middle class that has built a profile of the country somewhat different from other Latin American countries with a polarised social structure. As a result, Argentina reached the end of the 20th century with a well educated population and almost no illiteracy,” explains Tiramonti.

She argues that during the ‘70s there was a great increase in school enrollment rates, which the country did not use in its favour, failing to build a model that could include new social groups and preserve a certain quality in education.

Feria del Libro, by Beatrice Murch

Ever since, Argentina has experienced an educational crisis that makes its outcomes fall short of the desired expectations and with lower results than those of nearby countries such as Uruguay or Chile. This shows a problem in moving forward along the process of incorporating new social groups in the education system successfully.

International statistics may not seem to reflect this crisis. The UNDP Education Index for example, comprises the expenditure on education, the average years of schooling, and the literacy rates of each country. Tiramonti states that the divergence between the numbers and reality lies in the inability of statistics to reveal the broader problems of inequality and deinstitutionalisation, especially in secondary education: “Yes, Argentina’s education budget is very high, 6% of our GDP. However, this has no echo in learning outcomes if we take the PISA examinations as a parameter (international tests that measure reading comprehension, science, and basic math). Our scores there are very low. Yes, we have low illiteracy levels, but this is due to a social habit of sending children to school and because the primary level is much more successful than secondary education. Sometimes statistics are standardised numbers that do not communicate the real problems.”

Certainly, there are no figures that indicate the effects of the deterioration of public education as a result of social inequality or the high levels of absenteeism of both students and teachers due to a growing dissatisfaction with their school experience. The only numbers that more closely come to reflect the impact of these circumstances on learning levels are the PISA tests, whose results, as Tiramonti says, are nothing but discouraging.

A Nation of Readers

In what appears to be a contradiction, recent numbers of national and international surveys confirm that Argentines are regular readers. Every year the halls of the Feria del Libro (the international book fair held yearly in Buenos Aires) are full of people, and who has not seen men and women of all ages reading on buses or while travelling on the crowded subte of Buenos Aires? The National Survey of Reading Habits published on 2nd September provides information about the latest trends in Argentines’ reading habits. It states that 90% of the Argentine population reads at least 15 minutes per week, and 53% reads almost or every day. In addition, a study of the Regional Centre for Promotion of Books in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is part of the UNESCO, ranks Argentina as the country with the highest number of book readers in the region.

But what do these numbers mean with respect to the country’s education levels? According to Tiramonti, they talk about a literate population with a social habit built in the middle class: “There’s a clear social habit of reading that has to do with our social structure made of a very large middle class, and with the presence of education from an early age.”

Reading plays a big part in the learning process but what really matters is the quality of reading comprehension. According to Tiramonti, the PISA tests not only show low levels in this type of skill, but also exhibit a huge inequality among students from different social sectors, which she points out as one of the main obstacles to overcome in order to face the new challenges of education. After all, there is no reason to think that reading alone is the way to achieve significant improvements in education.

After so many optimistic numbers, fancy titles, and encouraging figures we end up with a big paradox between the information presented to the public, the voters, the press, and the world, and the real nature of today’s national education, which is far from positioning Argentina as the best educated country in the region.

“Results show that socially homogeneous societies develop greater social integration, some cultural homogeneity, and greater success in the education system” Tiramonti states.

Instead, Argentina’s education seems not to be providing equal opportunities any more, deepening the pattern of increasing inequality observed in the last decades, in a globalised world where human capital is the key to economic development and quality of life. As a consequence, the country is starting to fall behind the world.

“There is a tendency to think that education can solve all the inequities and failures of the system. I believe that education has a lot to do in terms of improving equality. But when societies are unequal, it is very difficult to build equality only by means of education”.