Ten years since the Law of Students’ Councils: the parliamentary debate about student participation in secondary schools

Abstract

It has been more than a century since, in Argentina, the state has been regulating students’ actions differently. The way in which it allows, controls, or forbids student participation, implies representations about youngsters, school, democracy, citizenship, and politics. According to educational norms, students’ actions considered legal (or not) are defined at the school level. But also, student
organizations, on different occasions, have accepted, questioned or rejected these regulatory attempts based on their repertoires of action, demands and construction of their own agendas. From the return to democracy until today, the debate about secondary school students’ participation has been carried out in different spaces: schools, mass media (radio, television, printed and/or digital
press), social media, government spaces, among others. In the last ten years, national laws (and also local) have been passed that regulate (and promote) young people participation -among them, students- in different instances: national and provincial elections, schools councils, students’ councils and youth parliaments.
The passing of these laws has taken place within the framework of a discussion on the arguments for the expansion of rights. This work focus on discourses on student participation from the analysis of bills presented in the National House of Representatives, the parliamentary debate generated in the process of approval of the first national law that regulates the creation of Students’ Councils, and the proposals of modifications submitted ten years after the law was passed. Our analysis concludes that, both in the bills and in the debate, a certain chronology about the secondary schools students’ movement in Argentina was defined that is biased depending on the political affiliation of the representatives in congress.  Moreover, the representatives’ activism is used as a basis to show support to the law.