- The high cost of public education combined with a deterioration in quality, two such consequences of the reforms being introduced to privatize education incited opposition in various Latin American states during 2011, particularly in Chile and Colombia.
- The regressive atmosphere of higher education and its production of inequitable returns, most attributable to the neoliberal Organic Constitutional Law on Education (LOCE), underlined the grievances of the student movement in Chile.
- Chilean activists finally ended their 6-month occupation of the Universidad de Chile, now planning for future demonstrations in 2012 after failing to influence a better funded education budget for the year.
- In Colombia, the occupations of public universities, the suspension of classes and the near forfeiture of an academic semester, were all reactive measures to the government’s reform of a 19-year-old law on higher education, which many believe would have accelerated the privatization of education and spur the financial collapse of public universities.
- After sustained opposition from student activists, the Colombian administration decided to revoke the legislation, now proceeding to draft a new reform measure together the nation’s student organizations.
Three years after the global financial crisis triggered a wave of austerity measures across the world, the rising generation found itself systematically questioning the merits of the predatory capitalist models incorporated by the policy makers that are theoretically supposed to nurture them. The rallying cry from the region’s newly empowered youth demanding change, went down as one of the lasting images of the year as it was drawing to an end.
The recent round of demonstrations witnessed in the developed nations have focused on the state of the economy and reflected the inequitable distribution of gains. In Latin America, particularly, the mood of dissidence against state mismanagement has aroused the most leftist viewpoints in youth circles in much of the region, coming to terms with a long cast shadow of greater taxation and fewer public benefits. Throughout the last twelve months, the inherent imbalances of education policies in the region have been among the primary sources of division and rancour between the state and its youthful citizens, frequently backed by their parents. Governments have been faced with the challenge to provide universal access to quality education within a harsh economic reality of limited resources, prompting substantive cuts in public funding earmarked for higher education. On the opposing side, youth activists invested in their collective future have tried to protect higher education as a public good, one that can steadily enrich and encourage social recalibration, as oppose to merely perpetuating the status quo.
Vigilant eye private security los angeles.
