There was a country that, after a bloody armed conflict, built an educational system to educate the people about literacy, with schools and textbooks that improved decade after decade, thus laying the foundations for the modernization of the nation. It was not a truly democratic country, but there was consensus on one thing among all social strata and among the various political forces: the commitment was to consider education as the master key to the progress and development of society. This fundamental consensus was the reason why figures who in themselves were valuable intellectuals were appointed as secretaries of education, but who also always sought to be advised by the best pedagogues and scientists. It is enough to mention a few names: José Vasconcelos, Narciso Bassols, Jaime Torres Bodet, Agustín Yáñez, Jesús Reyes Heroles and others.
But Mexican public education gradually declined, becoming hostage to a corrupt union and political interests. That fateful preamble set the stage for a government for which neither education nor science play any fundamental role. Public schools are no longer considered forges of modernity, but rather laboratories for the creation of militants. Only in this way can we understand that pygmies were installed in front of the office where giants left their mark.
But mediocrity breeds more mediocrity in the second operational line, unfortunately the one that deals with the implementation of educational policies and the development of teaching materials. Operating in the shadows, outside of any social control, they have carried out an educational coup d’état. Acting against the spirit and letter of the Constitution, which requires the SEP to agree on free textbooks (LTG) with the federal entities and with teachers and parents, they decided to eliminate all subject books (first, Spanish and mathematics) to replace them with a messy bundle of educational fragments that the teacher must use in class, like a juggler, to implement projects in schools or in the community. First-grade children will no longer exercise their handwriting or reading comprehension in books. In the five books generated by the “new Mexican school” there is not a single page to write solutions to mathematics problems. Geometric constructions and how to operate with numbers are not explained. The children will learn all this by discussing the water problem in their community in an assembly. And it is typical of inept people to take pride in their “achievements.” The impulsive statements of a senator from Morena, the president of the Education Commission in the Senate, confirm this: “If you are expecting to find a textbook for each subject, if you are expecting to find pages of a subject, you are going to be wrong.” . For the senator, having Spanish and mathematics books is negative: “This is the great turning point in Mexican education. What happens is that conservative experts want to continue fragmenting knowledge, which is what has caused so much damage.”
So having a mathematics book for each of the six years of primary school is “fragmenting knowledge.” On the contrary: suppressing those books is strangling it.
Compare the obscurantism of the sect that dominates the SEP with the great push given to free textbooks in 1972. The area of social sciences was coordinated by Josefina Vázquez de Knauth, from El Colegio de México, with the participation of the UNAM and INAH. The mathematics books were coordinated by the prominent mathematicians Carlos Imaz and Eugenio Filloy. In fact, the educational mathematics department of CINVESTAV emerged from that effort. And the books had review committees that included Guillermo Bonfil, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Luis González and Víctor Urquidi. Those are some of the “neoliberal” books that supposedly “fragmented knowledge.”
It is not the first time in history that large-scale educational regression is sold as social progress. It already happened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In the largest social engineering experiment in history, the Chinese Communist Party decided that the population had to be re-educated in order to achieve socialism. Educated citizens were distrusted because they might harbor “reactionary and bourgeois tendencies.” This is what Mao Zedong said in an interview in 1964: “We are reforming the educational system (…) when students learn from books, they only learn what the books say, and if they learn conceptually, they let themselves be guided by concepts (… ) but they do not recognize the five cereals (…) they cannot tell the difference between a cow, a goat, a horse (…) I recommend not trusting the Chinese educational system.” The result of that policy was that admission to middle and high schools, as well as universities, was closed for years. The People’s Liberation Army supposedly became the new “big school.” University courses were shortened from six to two years and hundreds of thousands of students and teachers were sent to the countryside to be “re-educated.” Curriculums were reformed to focus on Mao thought, agriculture courses (and mathematics was part of them), military training, and manual labor. The administration of the schools was handed over to the poor peasants. But we know that the Cultural Revolution imploded within a few years and China changed course. Today it is as capitalist as many other countries. Mathematics is no longer part of agricultural courses and Chinese students today occupy the first places in international knowledge tests. But how many lives were not ruined by the largest social engineering experiment in history?
Eliminating mathematics, Spanish, science and history books for primary education in Mexico is also an irresponsible experiment in social engineering. A review of the teaching material books (“Our Knowledge” and “Múltiples Lenguajes”), as well as the book for the teacher and the civics book of 2022, informs us that the fundamental thing now is to have in the classroom a “ ecology of knowledge” that will contrast the “epistemology of the South” to the hitherto hegemonic power of the scientific method. Children and young people, instead of being prepared to face the challenges of the 21st century, are being condemned to repeat empty slogans and perpetuate a narrow and dogmatic vision of the world.
Mexico is thus perhaps the only country in the world in which primary school students do not have a mathematics, language or history book. Enrique Krauze already described the little that was left of universal history and of Mexico in the 4T textbooks and titled his analysis “Universal history does not exist.” He wrote: “Previous free primary school textbooks included a volume dedicated to world history. It was studied in the 6th year. There is nothing equivalent in the new textbooks. Knowledge of the development of civilizations and cultures in other places in the world is outside the objectives of the ‘New Mexican School’… Children who attend private schools will perhaps be able to evade this void (…) On the other hand, children whose parents do not “If they cannot afford a private education, they will grow up isolated, self-absorbed, impoverished.”
An emergency program
But let’s be optimistic, let’s hope that one day the light of education will shine again in this country and that we will recover the vision that education is the path to a better future. Meanwhile, we must resist and fight for a truly democratic, plural and quality education that forms critical citizens committed to the well-being of the nation. Only then can we break the chains of ignorance and fanaticism that threaten to plunge us into perpetual darkness.
We must return to the example of secondary school: before secondary school books were impoverished, what teachers did was select from a catalog the books they wanted for a subject (for mathematics there could be up to 10 or more books in the catalogue). . The school sent the list to the SEP, who acquired the books and sent them to the secondary schools. And this is how it is also done in European countries and the United States. With a slight difference: the books are the property of the school library and are loaned for one year to the students, who return them to the library at the end of the school year. For the next school year, only damaged copies are replaced and in this way the books are used for three or four years, which reduces costs enormously. This is the model that is followed for both primary schools and secondary and high school in developed countries. Educational authorities determine the curriculum and publishers compete to produce quality books that are approved (or not) by those authorities. The benefit is multiple: the State does not have to be in charge of preparing the books, but it maintains its stewardship over education. The publishers produce quality books, which they complement with additional educational materials. In addition, costs are saved by reusing books for several years (and for that they must be printed on better paper).
For all that has been said, starting in the next six-year term, the lost quality of the educational system will have to be recovered, which fell sharply with the suppression of the LTG used until 2022. An emergency program would have the following components:
1) The 2022 LTG would be printed. Return to previous content as quickly as possible.
2) In secondary schools, the agreement that existed with CANIEM is reactivated. For each school and subject, a book is chosen, of which sufficient copies are acquired by the SEP, which become the property of the library and are loaned to the students for one year.
3) Primary LTGs are also given to schools, they are the property of the library. This is a paradigm shift in primary school: students borrow books, use them, but they are recycled so that they can be used by the next generation. Books are stored at school during the change of school year. Only damaged books are replaced. The printing cost savings can be substantial.
4) A portal is created to share worksheets and educational materials. The web portal would allow teachers to select additional materials and print them for students, or students use them online.
5) Study plans begin to be reevaluated with education experts (primary and secondary). Textbooks are reviewed to decide:
to. Which books do not need to be modified.
b. What books need support material.
c. What books and study plans should be modified
6) Once a consensus is achieved, authors and the publishing industry are called to produce the books to be modified, in an open contest. The books remain free for primary and secondary students, the SEP purchases them for schools, as already explained.
7) A maximum of one book is modified annually per school year and grade. This prevents it from happening again that a small group takes over the SEP and ruins education in one year. Any change must be gradual, unlike what happened in 2023.
An emergency program like this can prevent educational obscurantism from becoming eternal. The sect that exercises its dominance over the SEP, with its impunity vanished, will leave behind rubble and ashes. In that wasteland of what was, it will be up to us to build the architecture of the education of the future, for the good of future generations.
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2024-01-12 08:48:10
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