Chilean Student Movements: Sustained Struggle to Transform a Market-oriented Educational System

Abstract

During the last decade, Chilean society was shaken by sharply critical and powerful student movements: secondary students led the 2006 “Penguin Revolution” and university students led the 2011 “Chilean Winter.” This article describes and analyzes these student movements to illustrate how students can be highly relevant political actors in the educational debate. First, we explain the main features of the Chilean educational system, including its extreme degree of marketization, which provided the institutional context of the movements. Next, we analyze the key components and characteristics of the 2006 and 2011 student movements to describe basic features of the two movements and identify common elements of these movements, especially from an education policy perspective. We mainly focus on the link between students’ demands and discourses and the market-oriented institutions that prevail in Chilean education. Finally, we identify students’ impact on educational debates in Chile and examine general implications for policy-making processes in the educational arena.