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We've mentioned before that there have been many protests here in Santiago while we've been living here. They range from a few old ladies with whistles and flags, to full blown 100,000s of people marching with banners. Over the last couple of weeks there has been an ongoing protest - which has manifested itself in various ways including a sort of sit-in at Universidad de Chile, and a sort of non-stop Olympic torch run (with a flag not a torch) around La Moneda, the seat of Chilean Government, together with about three, so far, huge (around 200,000 people) marches down the Alameda - the main arterial street of Santiago.
These large protests are at the same time spectacular (involving groups of people dressed as zombies or vampires, thousands of people chanting), serious (we'll talk about the main issue below), hilarious (the stray dogs love these days - they run along with the protests enjoying the noise and camaraderie), and dangerous (almost always they end in violence).
The violence is a problem. Normally we're either in our apartment or at work, or otherwise not near when it kicks off, and we see the results on the news. Yesterday Struan had to go to his campus in the afternoon to teach and got caught up in the aftermath of the big march that had started in the morning. Getting teargassed by the police and hit with a rock by a violent protestor wasn't fun, but at least it gave him a balanced view of the situation...
The main issue at stake in the current protests is the cost of higher education. Academics like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein have written about how Chile, from 1973, became a sort of economic laboratory experiment for Friedmanite economists trained in the US - known as the "Chicago Boys" - who helped Pinochet create an economic system that is almost certainly more laissez faire than that of the US is today.
One manifestation of this is that the higher education sector in Chile is almost entirely privatised - more so than in the US. In the UK the system is fundamentally public, but now that we've moved further along the wedge to £9,000 per year "top-up" fees, that may not always be the case. Who knows, the theory behind "variable fees" appears to be that education would be priced like cars or something - but for most people education is an important investment of time (first, money second) that will define their entire lives. It's not rational to choose to be educated for £6K rather than £8.5K purely on the basis that will save a few grand now - particularly not when the model is based around borrowing the money. If you're going to invest in yourself and spend years of your life you might as well go for the best you can. If you want a car, most people are happy to have something to get from A to B until they can one day afford that dream motor. This doesn't work with a fundamental life decision like higher education, generally speaking you get one shot. Unsurprisingly the education "market" in the UK chose to distort itself immediately with the majority of institutions charging close to the maximum allowable - so that institutions would avoid appearing a lesser choice. That is rational, and predictable - few colleges are going to price themselves at the bottom of the pack.
Presumably the theory is that over time quality indicators will start to put the crappy institutions out of business, and then the better ones will expand to meet demand and everyone can pay £9K a year and be sure they are paying for a decent product. What may come to pass instead is that we get something along the lines of what Chile has - an expensive system short on quality. When we say expensive we mean to "consumers" as opposed to taxpayers - that's the point, no-one really expects a private system to be cheaper (look at the railways in the UK), but the cost is off the Government's books.
We work at a private institution. Teachers are mostly in favour of, and joining, the protests and anyway we aren't paid anything like the going rate for teachers in Santiago. We don't know enough about the education market in Chile to know where our institution sits on the scale, but it's certainly one of the (if not the) oldest and most established of its type, and is a spin-off from the highly regarded public Universidad Católica, one of the "Oxbridge" of Chile. The students at our institution get a decent education for their money - one bit of anecdotal and slightly ironic evidence is that the students come in spite of the fact that learning English is compulsory (as an ancillary subject). English courses are marketed as a reason to enroll, and for many students this is a major pull - competency in English increases employment prospects. Some students make the most of their classes, others lose interest once the reality of learning a language sinks in. But a fair few resent having to learn English from day one (after all they don't need English to get a job, it just increases their options) - sometimes you can inspire them, sometimes not, but they all know they have to do it and still enroll in our institution. They could go somewhere else and avoid compulsory English, but they don't.
The problems with quality and cost in the system generally are not our opinions, it's what the protesters are saying. Apart from the fact that 3-4 years of education paid for with bank loans essentially yokes entire families for years after, people feel that the government is neither funding education properly (which you wouldn't if your policy was to encourage privatisation) nor creating jobs (either directly or indirectly through economic policy, take your pick) that would make the huge personal investment in education worthwhile. The FT ran an editorial today (1 July) taking the view that governments should be investing in education.
Of course it's all connected to the worldwide mystery of where all the money has gone. The Greeks are not happy at all either, but we're sure Lloyd Blankfein could pacify them by explaining that God meant for him to have a large chunk of it. A blogger has noted that the acting head of the IMF until a few days ago, pushing for Greek "austerity" to ensure that French, German, and ultimately US, banks don't lose a lot of money, is the same guy who was the IMF representative in Chile between 1978 and 1980 at the height of Pinochet's regime. While Chile is now a relatively wealthy South American country, it remains highly unequal - wealthy Chileans do the school run in an SUV (one child in the X litre car obviously, in a country where the vast majority of people don't have central heating in their houses because of energy costs), while a large number of people still live and die in shanty towns.
And people are once again suspecting that Government has been captured by corporations. Our agency (which sees its role here in Chile as essentially social work) sent a story to us teachers recently about a US energy company building a polluting coal-fired generator within one of Chile's oldest communities near Valparaiso. Wikileaks revealed that successful legal challenges to the granting of a permit by the relevant authorities were brushed aside at executive level at the behest of the then US Ambassador to Chile, Paul Simon (alright, Simons).
So how do we feel about all this? The Police are just doing their job ultimately which is, like it or not, partly to protect public and private property. Like with the people who smashed up Royal Bank of Scotland in 2009, it's not always clear whether the violent protesters are really in it for the issues, or for the craic. It's also slightly strange to protest about the genuinely important lack of money in the public sphere by smashing up public property like traffic lights and signs, as happened in Santiago yesterday - but it's only a minority of mainly teenage protesters doing that. That said, as with the Police "kettling" tactics prevalent in the UK recently, it does beg the question of whether the Police might not be interfering with people's rights to protest to the extent that there's no choice other than violence - or at least that frustration will inevitably lead to violence. Put against a bigger picture of corporate subversion of governments, sticky unemployment while banks somehow continue to make millions, it's not surprising that people are getting fed up.
Anyway, protesting can be fun, here's some pics of the naked cyclists protest in Santiago.
chao!
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