If the government often accuses protesting farmers of striving to assert the interests of a sector over those of a nation, a very similar charge could be lodged against those students now occupying the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires — namely, imposing the views of a small minority on public education’s most prestigious institution. The unruly students demanding the right to co-govern the school in the name of “democratization” would seem to be producing their own take on the doctrine of Santa Fe Governor Hermes Binner pronounced on Flag Day in the context of the farm dispute: “Everybody’s rights exceed the rights of the majority” — everybody’s rights might indeed exceed the rights of a majority, the college usurpers would agree, but not the rights of a minority.
This student occupation, bringing classes in the nation’s most renowned school to a standstill, would already be important but it is by no means an isolated instance of insubordination on the part of a few spoiled elitist brats — two pupils in Caballito were expelled this week for assaulting a teacher, a news item which has been repeated far too frequently this year. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this mutinous youth is that the lines of defence are extremely weak — here the comparison with the Kirchner administration’s problems with the farmers breaks down. Ex-president Néstor Kirchner, who is spearheading the government drive to crush the rural tax revolt, was reared in the tough school of Peronist politics and knows perfectly well how to deal with rebellion — teachers, by way of contrast, are trained to be educators (unfortunately, not always even that) rather than disciplinarians or bush lawyers and thus have little idea how to handle such situations (as freely admitted by the Colegio Nacional’s headmistress Virginia González Gass). Nor are either teachers or parents backed up by increasingly permissive legislation. As from next year, the state will be strictly enforcing every child’s right to an education in such a way that the Caballito juvenile thugs could only be expelled from that particular school but must be relocated somewhere in the educational system. And in La Pampa there is now a ban on failing students on the grounds that it is difficult enough to motivate children to seek an education without inflicting this humiliation on them.
But even more humiliating is the general neglect of education and perhaps the worst of recent humiliations were the priorities selected by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in her social allocations for the export duty increase three weeks ago: 60 percent for hospitals, 20 percent for housing, 20 percent for highways and zilch for education (supposedly the key to the 21st century) — unforgivable neglect, given the deplorable state of inland and rural schools.
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