Chile’s Penguin Revolution and the 5,000-year-old frozen mummy
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Thank you. We did something that no one else had ever done. There was such an excitement and energy about this moment.
It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed. Witness history. History as told by the people who were there.
I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so. I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe.
Witness history from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson. The past brought to life by those who were there. This week, protests in Taiwan during the fight for democracy. The military started firing tear gas to try to disperse the people there. I told the public to leave the scene and that was the moment the conflict began. Also, the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazis' largest death camp.
When our troops moved in, the Nazis saw they did not have time to gas the remaining prisoners, so they started shooting them, spraying the barracks with machine gun fire. The barracks were flooded with blood.
Plus, the invention of television a century ago and the 5,000-year-old mummy found frozen in the Alps. I can only say he's definitely dead. He has been lying here for a long time, probably in the water and a very long time in the ice. That's all coming up. But first, an example of pupil power. For this, we travel back to Chile in 2006, when more than 600,000 children marched through the streets to protest about the standard of education in their schools. The nationwide demonstrations became known as the Penguin Revolution. Grace Livingston can tell us why. There were lots of placards saying, no more profits, quality education for all. There was a feeling of change in the air, a desire for social transformation.
I would say it was a kind of, I don't want to say chaotic, but kind of hectic, you know, in terms of mobilization and the shutdown of all schools. Karina Delfino was a 16-year-old schoolgirl and one of the leaders of the protest, known as the Penguin Revolution, because of the colour of their school uniforms. The boys wore black trousers and a white shirt and usually a dark tie and a black jacket. And the girls, we wore an navy blue jumper and a white shirt, so we were black and white penguins, or let's say blue and white penguins. The nationwide shutdown was the culmination of months of protests against inequalities in the education system. The protesters said that children from poorer backgrounds were taught in badly equipped, overcrowded classrooms and were far less likely to go to university than children from wealthy families.
It was the parents' ability to pay that ultimately determined the children's opportunities. That's what was put up for discussion by the Penguin Revolution. Why is it that if I don't have money, I'm almost condemned to not being able to go to university? The quality of education was at stake because in the end, educational inequality depended on whether you had financial resources or not. Karina herself grew up in a poor neighbourhood in Santiago. I was brought up with lots of love, but material things were in abundance, quite the reverse. For example, there were Christmases when my mother found it difficult to make a meal. At her primary school, she saw firsthand the lack of basic necessities. Sometimes the windows in the classroom were broken or the toilets didn't work.
We lacked materials like notebooks or erasers, but the teachers were very committed. When she was 15, Karina was elected president of her school's student council and she began to meet student leaders from other schools. They believe that inequalities in the education system stemmed from the changes introduced during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which was in power in Chile from 1973 to 1990. The military regime had introduced a market system, enabling schools to be profit-making businesses.
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