Support the public education for Chile

Support the public education for Chile

The Issue

Since almost a month and a half the chilean students have stopped their academic calendar in order to fight a rotten educational system that obligates us to take debts with the banks. A normal student has to pay 3 times the original value of his carreer. The average debt of a student (at the point of finishing his study) is of US$42600, wich means they will have to spend 25 years paying the study, not having for sure that they will work on that area. Even worse is that the Education Minister is the owner of a mediocre private University and has earned thousands of millions with the dreams of young people that look forward for a better future.

Our demands are simple: no more private economicall profit on the education; everybody must have the possibility to access the university not mattering if that person has money or not; all students on every University must have the right to free association (political or others) and freedom to demonstrate.

The fitght that the chilean students are supporting now is possible and has been proven that way; on the 60's and the early years of the 70's (before the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that started on 1973) the University was free for everybody who finished the school (wich was free too). Nowadays Chile exports 80 times more cooper (our first, and almost only income) as in the late 60's; we're the country with the highest income pro person on South America, yet the only one that hasn't public education of good quality; we're seven times richer as in the times in which the education was free and truly democratic.

The students of Chile need a change on our educational system if we want to get to be a developed land, as our bussinesman-president promissed.

This petition had 6 supporters

The Issue

Since almost a month and a half the chilean students have stopped their academic calendar in order to fight a rotten educational system that obligates us to take debts with the banks. A normal student has to pay 3 times the original value of his carreer. The average debt of a student (at the point of finishing his study) is of US$42600, wich means they will have to spend 25 years paying the study, not having for sure that they will work on that area. Even worse is that the Education Minister is the owner of a mediocre private University and has earned thousands of millions with the dreams of young people that look forward for a better future.

Our demands are simple: no more private economicall profit on the education; everybody must have the possibility to access the university not mattering if that person has money or not; all students on every University must have the right to free association (political or others) and freedom to demonstrate.

The fitght that the chilean students are supporting now is possible and has been proven that way; on the 60's and the early years of the 70's (before the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that started on 1973) the University was free for everybody who finished the school (wich was free too). Nowadays Chile exports 80 times more cooper (our first, and almost only income) as in the late 60's; we're the country with the highest income pro person on South America, yet the only one that hasn't public education of good quality; we're seven times richer as in the times in which the education was free and truly democratic.

The students of Chile need a change on our educational system if we want to get to be a developed land, as our bussinesman-president promissed.

The Decision Makers

Alexei Barrionuevo
Alexei Barrionuevo
Journalist, The New York Times

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Petition created on June 22, 2011