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El Ciudadano

Original article: Tragedia en Calama: Expresión de la crisis del sistema educativo, de la subjetividad neoliberal y el dolor y abandono de nuestras comunidades

By the Movement for Teacher Unity

As educators within school communities, we are deeply pained and shocked that a dedicated education worker has lost her life at the hands of a student.

This could have been our colleague we see every day, or a student we recently had in class.

While such incidents are not customary in Chile, they are not isolated or unexpected events. They are the direct result of years of systematic neglect in education, a society driven towards individualism, and permeated by hate speech that fractures social fabric and the moral and mental structure of individuals (Chile faces double the deaths by suicide compared to homicide, but such issues rarely get media attention).

This is the outcome of a culture of violence that becomes normalized in the media as our children eat their breakfast.

It reflects the madness of three years of genocide in Palestine broadcast on TV, the horror of a school being bombed in Iran, and the glorification of figures like Trump—president of a country where school shootings occur monthly—or Milei, who fantasizes about horror, warfare, abuses, and the annihilation of others.

This includes the media coverage of Deputy Olivares glorifying Pinochet, the likes on videos from Pedro Pool, a businessman close to Kast who threatened to shoot constitutional members in 2022; it also includes the complacency allowing someone like Johannes Kaiser to run for president after stating that «ugly women wish to be raped.»

It embodies machismo, patriarchy, and the incel culture. Yes, because most perpetrators are men (in Latin America, the USA, and worldwide), and many victims are women.

The tragedy in Calama forces us to confront the decomposition within our society, and consequently, within our schools. From here, we send all our strength to the family of our colleague and to every teacher, assistant, and education worker who enters a classroom with fear today. Working under the shadow of violence is not a vocation: it is absolute precarity.

But we also know what is coming: the criminalization of our students as an easy response. The instillation of fear, distrust, and the logic of the “internal enemy” within schools. We will not accept this. When the problem is structural and holistic, the solution cannot fit into backpacks.

If they want to open backpacks, then they should also uncover the financial secrecy that conceals organized crime. If they want to check backpacks, they should examine examples of world leaders, officials where the use of weapons, war rhetoric, and denialism that questions human rights are part of their ideological agenda.

Because schools should not become spaces of control, but rather places of care, community, and transformation. Education should aim to transform and humanize, not to control and criminalize.

Movement for Teacher Unity

La entrada Tragedy in Calama: A Reflection of the Educational Crisis, Neoliberal Subjectivity, and Community Pain se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.