Communicative Competence Upper Intermediate

Level II
Mrs Iris Roa G.

Reaction Paper










Section: 1
Students: Albornoz, M. Timothy.
Herrera, C. Isidora.





Concepcin, October 13
th
, 2014

Summary
The article Minister sends bill to allow citizen participation in education reform, written by Maria
del Carmen corpus published on the Santiago times in Friday, July the 18th of 2014 claims the
opportunity given by the Government to the Chilean Students Organizations to participate in a
draft bill. This draft bill called National Citizen Participation Plan will allow citizens to take part of
the superior education new reform decisions. In spite of this possible chance given by the
Government, Students Organizations such as FECh and FEUC do not seem to be totally convinced
with the Education Minister intentions and the workability of the bill draft, because of past failure
proposals that the Government intended to set up within 2011 Students Movement.

Even though for many people this occasion was the only chance for students and citizens to
participate and have a real opinion about the Education Reform, students realized that these bill
drafts were not decisive for the Reform at all. This would have been a cover strategy for creating a
reform with a fake participation of the people. Minister of Education, Nicols Eyzaguirre stated
*...+ these (bill drafts) will allow people to present their proposals and concerns about education.
However, he never states how these proposals will be taken into account for the design of the
reform, knowing that there are thousands of people that can give an opinion about the upcoming
education reform. Moreover, the concerns about education are commonly known by most of the
Chilean families, so there is no coherence between what the Government declares about the
solutions and what the Government is planning to do with the bill drafts. As a result, there is not a
real guarantee that these changes will be applied to the education system, and probably the
reform will not have any improvement with a conjecturable participation of citizens and students.
Besides, Minister Eyzaguirre points out that this will be a more democratic process, but his
perspective of democracy is not assuring that citizens opinion will even count on Government's
plans. Democracy is decisive and must have an impact on the decisions taken by all the
participants, which is something that is not granted by the bill drafts, as in plebiscites.
Nevertheless, we save the intention of the Minister, which seems to be replicating the old Chilean
Cabildos Abiertos (town meetings) where all the people of a particular geographical place would
share their thoughts and opinions of a certain topic. It is remarkable in a sort of way to invite
people to participate and get involved in public policies, something that may be impossible to be
made nowadays. This is the main reason why these ideas are only wills and may not work within
our current society, where only townspeople are able to take part of governmental decisions. The
Chilean demography does not allow all the people to participate. Lets only imagine 10.000 people
discussing about education and health in a room, it will be a complete disaster, even if we are
exaggerating what the Minister proposes, from the democracy idea to the specification of the
project.
Despite of the fact that the government needs to listen to their citizens opinion, students
organizations such as FECH and FEUC have been disputed several times because of their lack of
organization and attitude towards taking decisions on the name of all the Chilean students. These
organizations are supposed to represent the majority of us, but they do not even represent a
minimal percentage of universities students, not even primary and secondary schools which this
last do not have a concrete organization that can promote primary students opinion.
In closing this reaction paper, we think that there are still some deficit on the organization and
proposals from the government on the production of the educational reform, and also the aspects
of this reform that are not clear enough; for instance, how will the community will participate on
the creation of the educational reform.
Summary: 120 words
Evaluation: 538 words
Article: 3 pages.
Link to the article: http://santiagotimes.cl/minister-sends-bill-allow-citizen-participation-
education-reform/

By: Timothy Albornoz & Isidora Herrera