‘What can one do against democracy?’ The co-construction and destruction of ‘Student Democracy’ in a Chilean public high school

Abstract

This article examines how the actors of a Chilean public high school navigated the political scenario produced when its students decided to occupy their school to protest a national Educational Reform. Using ethnographic data and interviews with high school students, it proposes to understand this process in the context of a figured world directly linked with youth activism and student contentious politics: that of ‘Student Democracy’. The article argues that this figured world is constantly being produced by students, teachers and parents engaging in contentious local practices and that, in doing so, they create new opportunities for political action and citizenship education within school settings. It also argues that, by engaging with this figured world, students are participating in both ‘Student Democracy’ and the broader societal democracy, learning to be citizens in the present, and to deal with the possibilities, risks, and responsibilities that democratic participation always entails.

Keywords:

• Civic engagement
• democratic citizenship education
• democracy
• figured worlds
• high schools
• student protests
• youth activism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the students, teachers, and parents who participated in this study and generously allowed me to learn with and from them. I also want to thank Valentina Errázuriz, Rachael Stephens, Juliette de Wolfe, Ray McDermott, Hervé Varenne, Daniel Friedrich, Lesley Bartlett, Nicholas Limerick, Bradley Levinson, Amelia Herbert, and all the members of the 2014-15 Colloquium in Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University, for their insightful comments and feedback to this paper. The author is a fellow of the Becas Chile program of CONICYT Chile.

Notes

1. In Chile, cohorts are divided by groups. Each one receives a letter that identifies it and has a Head teacher, who works directly with the students and their parents for a year or two.

2. ‘Student Democracy’ is the concept generally used by Chilean high school students to talk about the different actions linked to students’ politics. ‘Student Government’ is used to refer to the particular students who represent the student-body of a school. Acknowledging this, in this article I use these two concepts in the ways my participants do.

3. During the Class-Council every cohort-group meets with their Head teacher for 45 min and discusses different issues, from the organisation of recreational activities to the participation of the cohort-group in political demonstrations.

4. The other two criteria are students’ high school grades, and the ‘ranking’ each student occupies in their cohort according to their school GPA.