Matías's story
Matías started high school at a private school in 2013.
At school, he suffered from bullying. While at home, his parents were splitting up. Later that year, he would be diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
“I spent a lot of time with girls and I didn't play football, so they would tease me. I didn't say anything to my parents...
I remember one time they told me I had female-looking eyelashes. I went home and shaved them off, thinking it was something bad.”
The following year, Matías changed to a different private school. However, there, he was still a target of bullying.
“One time I was taking insulin and they were teasing me, saying that I was taking heroin.”
At the time, Matías was struggling with his mental health and had to be taken to the hospital in several occasions, which led him to abandon school that year, and, later on, change schools.
This time, he went to a state school.
But his health and mental health kept being fragile, and he also had to abandon before the end of the year.
The following year he repeated second grade, and decided to change to another state school.
“I felt the change a lot. The people were totally different. (...) In winter we were cold because there were broken windows.”
The following year, in 2016, he did 3rd grade in the same school.
“At that school, I was once beaten up. There was violence, not necessarily for any particular reason. There was a lot of fighting, you could feel the tension in the air.”
Given that the school only offered basic secondary education, the following year, he changed to another state school, this one focused on upper secondary education, where he started 4th grade.
But due to his mental health, he abandoned before the end of the year.
In the following year, he changed schools to his sixth institution, where he gave 4th grade a second try.
“It took me like five years to finish 4th grade”.
“I would sign up for all the subjects and then dropped some or failed some. I also failed because of absences.”
And then, in 2021, he started 5th grade, and changed to night school, where he chose the Artistic orientation.
By that time, Matías was 21. He worked and had studied other courses in fitness, gymnastics and photography. So the following year, he took three subjects that he had pending from 4th grade: History, Physics and Chemistry
The following year, he went back to night school, where he took all the subjects from 6th grade, with the exception of two, and two subjects from 5th that he had pending.
It is now 2024. Matías is 25 and taking the last two subjects he has left from 6th grade at night school. If he passes them, this December he will get his high school diploma.
“One of the things that motivates me the most is not having to lie on my CV that I have finished high school. Because I haven't, and I feel bad because I know I'm doing something, which is perhaps necessary, but that goes against my ethics and my morals.”
Matías hopes that next year, he can go on to study Marketing and advertising.
This is what his educational trajectory looks like.
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