Student's strikes in Chile

Nowadays, Chile suffers a lot from inequality, and from the enormous gap between poor and rich populations. Therefore, gratuity for public schools seems to me as a huge step toward equality. This means that every single people in Chile would have the possibility to access advanced education. To me, this would be a great progress for the education in Chile and for the equality within the Chilean population.

To that end, the student’s strikes through Chile with the objective of getting free education are very important and necessary to the development of the country.

Nevertheless, from what I can understand, for some time now, the strikes take a real place in the education calendar, in the Universidad de Chile at least. To my mind, when you do strikes too many times, or for too long, or too regularly, it tends to lose its point and lose its impact.

To me, the difficulty with strikes is to use it well, and not excessively. I know it as a fact, because in France “we” also have a tendency of striking a lot, and at the end, it does not change anything, because it tends to become more like a habit than something punctual.

In this situation, I think that “skipping” two months of class is not the best way of saying its ideas. As a matter of fact, I find it a little bit contradictory: to strike for a free education, when yourself decide to put your studies aside, and not go to the university for two month when you paid for it.  Because of course, when you do not go to class for two months in the middle of a term, you tend to lose your effectiveness and your rapidity to get back to your work and thus pass aside a part of the benefit of your education.