SANTIAGO, Chile — The student protests that paralyzed Chile this week have been widely depicted as a symptom of the failure of this country’s free-market-oriented education system. In reality, they are partly a product of its success, partly a result of its excesses.
Before we get into what went wrong, we have to remember that Chile has one of the best education systems in Latin America. In the latest international PISA test of 15-year-old students in maths,