High-school pupils' protests against curriculum changes reflect the deficiencies of Argentina's representative democracy
By H.C. | BUENOS AIRES
FOR 11 days last month, pupils took turns guarding the door of National of Buenos Aires (CNBA), one of the Argentine capital's finest public high schools. On hearing a knock, the youthful sentinels would open the tall wooden door just enough to ascertain the knocker's identity. Fellow pupils (as well as your correspondent) were allowed to slip into the school’s long hallway. Administrators had the door slammed in their face.
Over the past two weeks, student governments from 15 high schools in Buenos Aires, including CNBA, “took” their schools. They stopped classes, ousted staff and organised a public march from the national Ministry of Education to its municipal equivalent, blocking traffic from entering one of the city's busiest avenues. Many protesters continued to attend school each day, but only to debate among each other, participate in extracurricular activities, and chat with the media about their grievances. Some slept in classrooms and auditoriums to prevent the school authorities from wresting back control.
Such adolescent rebellion is unthinkable in many countries, but school occupations have become almost an annual tradition in Buenos Aires. In 2010 students seized 23 schools in protest against decrepit facilities A year later they took over 11 schools complaining about poor heating. And in last year over 40 schools witnessed discontent over planned curriculum changes in vocational colleges; in some classes were halted for a month.
Argentine pupils have ample reason to feel aggrieved. The quality of their education has declined markedly in the past decades. Once boasting the region's best schools, Argentina placed a dismal 58th out of 65 countries in the latest PISA tests of educational attainment. This year pupils are rallying against the New Quality Secondary School (NESC) reform, a curriculum change first introduced by the Federal Education Council in 2009 as part of a broader education law. The reform package, which would replace guidelines instituted in 1960, aims to harmonise high-school curriculums across the country.
In Buenos Aires, the NESC reforms would turn 158 academic specialties on offer (from hydraulics to pedagogy) into ten more general areas such as social or physical sciences, economics, communication or physical education. Pupils fret that a less-focussed curriculum will make it harder to get jobs and result in the dismissal of many of their teachers. They also criticise the government for not giving them more say in the reform process.
Buenos Aires's minister of education, Esteban Bullrich, promises no teachers will be fired and that the reform would mean merely a reorganisation, not a reduction, of focus areas. He likens the process to sliding 158 books onto 10 different shelves. The change will make it easier for pupils moving between provinces to continue their courses.
Mr Bullrich, who belongs to the opposition Republican Proposal (PRO) often at loggerheads with President Cristina Fernádez, admits that for once, “it’s a good reform.” He believes that some protesters may have misapprehended the real implications of the reform. Others, he says, were merely looking for a fight: CNBA and one other occupied school, for instance, are run by the University of Buenos Aires, not the city government, and would not be affected by the NESC reforms at all.
By September 28th, after more than ten days without lessons had not secured an audience with either Mr Bullrich (who argues that you don't negotiate with pupils over what they should study or how) or the national education minister, Alberto Sileoni, four schools resumed classes. Several others followed suit on September 30th. The remaining three are expected to yield soon, though Nicolas Cernádas, the spokesman for the CNBA pupil government, warned on national television that if the government does not respond to demands within a week they will block off some of the city’s most important streets.
As Jason Beech of San Andrés University points out, in the absence of transparency and institutional responsiveness under Ms Fernández, and earlier under her late husband, Nestor Kirchner, protesting is how Argentines participate in politics. “They block, they march, they occupy.” As a consequence, Argentina’s youth equates protesting with an assertion of popular will. That bodes ill for country's representative democracy in the next generation.
