The President of the Chilean Teachers’ College, Mario Aguilar, has been elected to the Executive Committee of Education International for Latin America, EILA, for the period 2024-2028.
In his first speech to the General Assembly, the Chilean teacher leader reviewed the Chilean education system over the last decades and mentioned some of the problems that remain: “the abandonment of public education; the overburdening of teachers’ work with a useless administrative and bureaucratic overload that does not serve a great pedagogical work and that only stresses and makes teachers sick”.
Mario Aguilar added: “The problems of coexistence in schools, which is why we are demanding a law that will effectively protect us from the various aggressions and the standardized education that turns our children into numbers to be worked with to increase scores, forcing teachers to become trainers rather than educators”.
The President of the Chilean Teachers’ Association also highlighted the historical debt, explaining to all those present from different countries that “it was generated during the dictatorship, 43 years ago, and it has still not been resolved”.
Finally, the teacher leader said, “We cannot continue to repeat what we have done before if we want different results, and as a union, we are reviewing our actions to ensure that these changes are indeed possible and that we manage to recover education as a social right and not as a market product”.
The election of the President of the Chilean Teachers’ Association, Mario Aguilar, to the Executive Committee took place during the 13th Regional Conference, held in San José, Costa Rica, from 7 to 9 April.
Education International (EI) is an international federation of education unions representing more than 30 million teachers and education staff, with more than 400 affiliates in 177 countries in different regions of the world.
EI is the only global federation that represents all teachers and education workers to protect their rights and those of their students. They are defenders of quality public education, accessible to all.
