SANTIAGO, Chile — A blanket stretched over their legs, Johanna Choapa and Maura Roque, both 17, sat in front of the stage in a chilly school auditorium last week as more than 300 parents and teachers debated whether to continue supporting their hunger strike aimed at pressuring the Chilean government to reform the country’s education system.

“We want the government to feel the pressure from you and from us, so we need a lot of support,” said Ms. Roque, who said she had been on an all-liquid diet for 11 days.

About three dozen high school and university students have turned to starving themselves to raise the stakes on the government of President Sebastián Piñera. In the more than two months since education protests began in this country, students have organized rallies drawing up to 100,000 people, taken control of dozens of schools around the country, and forced hundreds more to stop holding classes. Their protests, and the issues driving them, have helped to sink the popularity of the president to its lowest level since he took office last year.

If the Arab Spring has lost its bloom halfway across the world, people here are living what some have come to call a Chilean Winter. Segments of society that had been seen as politically apathetic only a few years ago, particularly the youth, have taken an unusually confrontational stance toward the government and business elite, demanding wholesale changes in education, transportation and energy policy, sometimes violently.