The long silence of education in Mexico

Students from a public secondary school in Mexico City attend classes in June 2021. Andrea Murcia (CUARTOSCURO)

Mexico is addressing an educational change that aims to bury the model in force for decades, according to the president, a neoliberal, individualistic, competitive model, for another based on socio-community learning.

The change is so profound that schoolchildren will no longer have grades, but phases.

However, such a change in the lives of millions of people, including fathers and mothers, students and teachers, is buried under such a thick silence.

Just this week, with the participation of those responsible for the Ministry of Public Education in the morning, Mexicans began to learn about this educational reform.

The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, spoke briefly about it, he referred to the teachers in the first place, whom "he will never offend again," he said;

then he mentioned the contents and scholarships.

What has happened in these more than three years of six-year terms so that such a vast reform is now beginning to be known?

Will there be time to implement such changes in the classrooms?

Who else who least wonder about the realization of these measures, barely outlined in public.

Education specialists know that there has been a popular consultation among teachers to address some of the changes, but not many details are known about that either.

Accustomed to a president who sets the agenda like no other, the question arises spontaneously: why hasn't education risen in these three years as one of the key issues of López Obrador's mandate?

Why is it not mentioned insistently in the morning, as it is done with corruption or poverty or security or the media?

The political scientist Martha Singer believes that this matter does occupy an important place in the presidential cabinet, without being able to say where it stands with respect to the rest of the priority policies, but she believes that it is part of the great transformations that the president foresees for Mexico.

If more is not known about the changes undertaken, Ella Singer blames it on the media, which does not find it as attractive as other issues.

She assumes the professor of Political Science at UNAM that has been "a silent debate, without diffusion or public domain."

Others believe that education is in this mandate in the place it was in the previous ones: "It has never been the priority of any government and the result is that inequalities in the educational field are deeper and deeper, as has been shown by the pandemic,” says María del Rosario Melgarejo Aguilar, doctor of Pedagogy at UNAM.

In her reflections there is an accumulated bitterness: “Educational policy is being the victim of uneventful reforms in which accurate analyzes are lacking to determine the areas of opportunity that governments can use.

The president's speech is incoherent, he talks about the poor, but he does not offer them a strengthened or quality education”.

Melgarejo believes that homogeneous criteria are being applied to treat a completely different population,

such as rural and urban students.

“Removing the degrees, fine, but with what objective, nobody has told what progress will be made with it or what results are expected.

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but without great explanations”, he criticizes.

"This is a dyslexic policy, without an approach to addressing structural changes," she concludes.

Large axes are indeed known.

That they do not want to harm the teaching profession, that the contents and the school format are being changed, that the textbooks are being renewed and that an improvement of the school infrastructures will be addressed.

The approach to teachers seems to be the most concrete policy.

Their salary has been raised above the CPI every year.

The Government says that by the end of this year "around 650,000 education workers" will have a fixed position, who will no longer be subject to the evaluations implemented in the previous six-year term.

The federal government will take over the payroll of all teachers to avoid defaults and delays.

And the great education union, the SNTE, has received a good accolade, as a "frank ally" of education, the same position it held in previous six-year terms.

Everything else, the contents, the textbooks, remains shrouded in the haze of rhetoric for now.

"We want a humanistic, fraternal, non-individualistic, selfish education," the president said about school content, but without specifying anything else.

The person in charge of revising the textbooks, Marx Arriaga Navarro, lamented "the social problems" caused by an educational model that is "meritocratic, behavioral, punitive, patriarchal, racist, competitive, Eurocentric, colonial, inhuman, and classist."

And he recalled that "more than a million people have participated in informative assemblies" in the debate for the improvement of education.

It is about, he has said, configuring a new model where the school is "a space of social transformation, where historical memory is recovered,

Those seem to be the keys, the speech, before the silence of the unions and the opposition.

Nobody seems to talk about education.

"My impression is that the president tries to eradicate neoliberalism from school, but in his policies he does not do it, the logic of neoliberal prosperity for companies has not changed," says the professor at the Colegio de México Manuel Gil Antón.

“He, too, hasn't addressed a tax reform, which would be key against neoliberalism,” he adds.

“It is very curious, because he repeats that they are not the same as the previous ones, but he is doing the same as Peña Nieto: he authorizes a profound modification of the educational system without the possibility of pilot tests, immediate changes and by decree, starting in August,” he criticizes. Gil Anton.

In the absence of the small print, the specialists glimpse the changes thanks to the government rhetoric.

"I think that education is being a labor political tool, especially with teachers, but that it has little to do with the real educational issues, that is, how children and young people learn," says UNAM sociologist Roberto Rodríguez, specialist in educational policy.

He believes that this modification will be added to those of 2011 and 2016, going through the school life of the students, who will go through three educational reforms on their way.

He believes that the changes in the curriculum and in educational texts, "because of the documents that have transpired", put the emphasis "on the political and the ideological" and that it leaves aside the axes through which "the most successful educational models, which prepare for a cultural, cognitive,

López Obrador usually defends direct aid, without intermediaries, who have often been actors of corruption.

That same system applies to education, with scholarships for students, financial support for families to organize from the school canteen, pay teachers for overtime or the construction of a school.

All of this now forms part of the planned educational changes and it is at this point that the greatest precision can be found.

Many details remain to be known about how the Fourth Transformation promised by this Government will be implemented in schools.

The president has promised that from now on there will be more talk about education, as he told a journalist this Wednesday: "We are going to be constantly reporting on the education plan."

Only in this way can this matter come out of the silence in which it has been submerged for half of the six-year term, where the loudest voice was given by the closed schools.

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