The crisis at the Carlos Pelligrini ( a prestigious state high school in the orbit of the University of Buenos Aires) has been going on for six months now, a period which has seen dozens of bomb hoaxes, a donnybrook in the bar and severe disruption of classes, yesterday claimed the scalp of the of the school’s Head.
A frequently heard demand of the rebellious students and their parents throughout the crisis is that that the school be democratised. Similar demands were at the heart of the crisis that disrupted the administration of the University of Buenos Aires last year and that continues to hamstring it today. As far as I can tell, those demanding it understand democratisation to be the selection of authorities by way of a ballot of all those involved in the institution in question. There is some variation in the demands about how universal such a suffrage would be but there seems little disagreement with the idea that students should have a substantial role in choosing those who lead the schools and university where they study.
So, calls for the Pellgrini to be democratised do not imply that the normal constitutional rights of those who work and study there have somehow been abrogated and ought to be restored to them. Nothing like that has occurred. Such calls amount to a demand for an elite school, graduation from which confers considerable life advantages and which is paid for from general taxation (given the highly regressive nature of the taxation system in Argentina, this means disproportionately paid for by poor people) to set itself up as a kind of miniature republic with its leaders elected, at least in part, by children and answerable to no one but itself.
The absurd and antidemocratic nature of this proposal should be self-evident but I’ll spell some out some reasons anyway. Schools are places where children go to learn. They go there to learn from people who know more about the subjects on the curriculum that they do and to do so in an educational context administered by those with the appropriate experience and training to do so. They don’t go to participate in some kind of publicly-funded playpen democracy and still less to participate in the selection of who administers or teaches in the school or what is to be taught there. They simply don’t know enough and are not mature enough to be able to do so, that’s why they don’t get the vote until they are 18. Teachers and administrators should be appointed on merit, not on the basis of how popular they are with staff and students. I know that deciding what constitutes merit and how to select those with the most of it is not a simple matter but this is no excuse for handing over responsibility for doing so to those plainly unqualified to do so as a result of either their age and ignorance (the children) or the natural human tendency to see the public interest as best served by whatever arrangement best suits one’s own personal ends (the teachers and other staff).
0 Responses to “Democracy”