It happens in any march or manifestation that is done in the street. There is an inverse relationship between the number of people who "see" the organizers with respect to those who inform the authorities. Thus, if the organizers speak of hundreds of thousands, for example, it is expected that the police observe tens of thousands. There is nothing to do: mathematics is usually among the main victims of political protests . With the teacher stoppages something similar happens: to know how many teachers really missed class one tends to be located at the midpoint between what the authorities report and what the unions announce. A lot can not miss it.

But now there seems to be a novelty. The government of Vidal went out to "admit" that almost half of the teachers adhered to the strike. Suteba said that 85% stopped. The government claims that the figure came from a survey, although it can not be ruled out that there has been some calculation regarding the future of the conflict. Maybe someone is thinking for 2018 a teaching conflict as long as it was in 2017, when the differences took 17 days of classes in the first 3 months of the school year.

The logic would indicate that if the conflict starts with 50% adhesion, and then it continues , it will be much easier to capitalize a future decline in the adherence to the pair , than if it started with a, say, 20% adhesion. Difficult to know if there is any of this in official speculations, although we will see it as the conflict advances.

The truth is that the measure of strength had a disparate adhesion, according to Clarin's travels . But whether hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands, Argentine students were those who could not start the school year. They are the same children who later will not have classes because of building problems in many cases, or because in the middle of the school calendar there are "training" sessions for teachers.

It's time to think about education seriously. Otherwise, the "game of stoppages" can end up costing quite a lot of a generation of Argentines.