EDUCATION

 

EDUCATION IN CHILE

I believe that as evidence of the various protests and claims of young people and parents looking for a better quality education for their children, there is no doubt that education in Chile has many deficiencies. From the inequality in quality, as in the physical spaces of the different establishments throughout Chile or in the clear competition that exists between someone who is better prepared or worse prepared than others for university studies, makes it clear that the problem is not specific, less individualized. A large percentage of our population suffers as a consequence of something as important as education, but I would also like to point to a totally different point, far from the responsibilities of the state and our authorities in this issue (which are quite clear and almost never fulfilled) and that is when the quality of the school does not depend only on the teacher or the management itself, it also depends on the students.

In my school, which was particular subsidized, I will not deny that it suffered from a lack of basic implements for an establishment where my parents had to pay a significant amount of money every month for a "quality" education, therefore, being aware that this was a clear burden for a family with three students and, in fact, five people who had to meet basic needs, I tried to keep my student scholarship for my grades annually intact. No matter that the bathrooms sometimes lacked toilet paper, the doors were bad, the chairs were broken, there were nearly fifty students in each classroom, and the projectors simply played a decorative role instead of projecting what the teacher was trying to teach, I will never forget to highlight one thing: The teachers on their own.

Each had their own way of teaching, but they were all "human." They cared about the students not only for their school performance, they also cared about their well being as a person and about their values. Even so, their lessons were exceptional, they dedicated all their time (even outside their work hours) in thinking in new strategies so that everyone could learn and stay at the same level, but few students took advantage of it. Our teachers, I must confess, were real experts in each of the subjects they had to teach, but they lacked the most essential thing: Someone really interested in listening to them.

It was almost impossible to pay attention, disrespect was what was driving the lessons and, eventually, our teachers became frustrated and gave up, ignored or, directly, gave up and abandoned. Of course not all of them gave up, I know that some of them are still at my school teaching with the same vocation with which they taught me, but it' s really their fault that my school was about to close every year for the low performance it kept?