The Mexican standoff
Unearthing aliens, injecting children with the virus of communism, and setting fire to textbooks.
Good news election fans – 2024 is going to be a bumper year.
In the UK we will almost certainly have a general election (because even the current government can’t be mad enough to push it out to January 2025). In the blue corner is Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government promising “long-term decisions for a brighter future” (while scrapping a whole raft of long-term, future-facing policies). And in the red corner, Kier Starmer’s Labour Party, riding high in the polls from their strong policy position of not being the Conservatives.
In the US there’s a rematch. One old man at the centre of several federal investigations into corruption will duke it out against another old man at the centre of a federal investigation into corruption.
Over in Mexico, the campaign for the June 2024 general election is going to resemble a lucha libre wrestling match. It’s going to be colourful, dramatic, and maybe even violent. And right now it’s getting started with an almighty row over some textbooks.
Once upon a time in Mexico
In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador was sworn in as Mexico’s president. Not only was he the first left-wing president in 70 years, but his leftist coalition won by a landslide, securing the first outright majority since 1988.
On the back of such a strong political swing and mandate, you might typically expect bold policies and big changes.
However, in early 2020, Covid came along. The government’s handling of the pandemic was… not great. The government locked down the country only after protesting that the spread and impact of the virus was part of a media and opposition conspiracy. Then it reopened before the lockdown could properly take effect, leading to higher infection rates and death tolls.
Despite a somewhat loose approach to restrictions elsewhere in scoiety, schools went into a 14-month shutdown. This was disastrous for learning, as reported in Slate:
Sonia’s is just one of more than 230,000 schools across Mexico that finally welcomed students and teachers back, after 14 months of complete shutdown. As they did so, they battled against improvised and incomplete government plans. In March 2020, Mexico’s federal government (which sets nationwide school curricula in a highly centralized fashion that would be unthinkable in U.S.) announced mandatory countrywide school closures and offered a “Learn from Home” program that would rely heavily on TV as a surrogate teacher. This was the remotest of remote learning. In many schools students and teachers didn’t even stay connected; instead, students and their families were expected to keep pace with televised lessons supplemented by national lesson plans online. Some teachers sought to stay in touch with their students despite the lack of public support or plan for doing so. But a mere two months into the pandemic the Ministry of Education admitted that 20 percent of all students had already lost touch with their schools.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the government suffered in the mid-term elections in 2021. The coalition maintained a simple majority in the lower house of Congress, but failed to secure a supermajority.
I’m goin’ send him to outer space
Like many governments over the last few years, the urgent work of dealing with a critical national health crisis trumped all other policy-making agendas. But with the pandemic in the rear-view mirror and the 2024 general election less than 12 months away, the Mexican government has been looking for ways to demonstrate a reforming vision to secure another term in power.
Some of the initiatives seized on are along the lines of what you might expect to see from a left-wing government. For example, in September, the Supreme Court decriminalised abortion. This has played well with women’s rights activists and angered the conservative right, thereby providing a next dividing line.
Other interventions have been less conventional. A congressional hearing about UFOs captured the world’s attention when the remains of two mummified “non-humans” were wheeled out for all to see.
And then there’s the radical new curriculum, embodied by a suite of textbooks, which have landed on school desks at the start of term.
I’ll take your brains to another dimension
While alien autopsies have raised eyebrows, the new textbooks have raised hackles.
Short on time and desperate to overcome the legacy of the lengthy school closures, the Ministry of Education rushed through a dramatic change in curriculum. Traditional subjects melted away in cross-curricular enquiry-based pedagogy. Vocabulary was changed to introduce gender-neutral versions of Spanish. There had been suspicions that the books would be politicised from as far back as 2021 when the project was first announced:
In a training session broadcast online, Arriaga [the Education Ministry’s director of educational materials] made it clear that the books should have both a political and pedagogical function, apparently saying in code that they should be sympathetic to the current government and propagate its ideals.
Now, with the books available for public scrutiny, those concerns have come to fruition. As the Financial Times reports:
A group of indigenous parents in southern Mexico took to burning new school textbooks amid a furious reaction to their allegedly politicised content, gender-neutral language and lack of basic reading and maths material.
[…]
The texts were published less than a month before Mexican children return to school on Monday. Managed by a former Venezuelan government official and an educational director named Marx Arriaga, they draw heavily on Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a target for conservative criticism of leftist thinking in his home country1.
As well as a good old-fashioned bonfire of books, parents have organised around the tools of democracy. The National Parents’ Union delivered a petition to the Ministry of Public Education with 112,594 signatures demanding that distribution of the textbooks be halted “because of sexualized and gender ideology content inserted without parental consultation”.
Local media has fanned the flames. News anchor Javier Alatorre offered his perspective on the issue, surely inspired by the bombastic style of Fox News: the new textbooks are attempting to inject “the virus of communism” into children. Hashtag LIBROSCOMUNISTAS. Cue sinister music and a backdrop with the hammer and sickle.
And the judiciary has weighed in. The Third District Court in Administrative Matters in Mexico City decreed at the end of May 2023 that distribution of the books should be definitively suspended. The Ministry of Public Education claimed on social media that there was “no legal impediment” to distribution as the court’s ruling wasn’t final and could be appealed, so pressed ahead. Despite this, eight states have suspended distribution while waiting for the legal case to be settled.
More haste, less speed
Let’s look beyond the bitter war between Mexico’s political factions for a moment. The new textbooks usher in a significant change in teaching. According to the Independent (which, ironically, sandwiches the following paragraphs between extensive coverage of the ideological debate):
And the ideological debate has obscured the bigger fact that the new texts introduce a whole new teaching method, something never before done in Mexico, where in the past, each administration updated the texts but kept the subjects largely the same.
No longer will there be separate lessons — or textbooks — on subjects like math, reading or social studies. It's all mixed together, into multi-subject stories or projects, intended to give a more hands-on “experiential” learning process.
Set aside concerns about whether the books themselves are any good and regardless of the relative merits of the respective approaches to teaching and learning for a moment2. A shift in methodology requires preparation, training and support to have any chance of being successful.
And here’s the rub, as the Financial Times reports:
In its defence of the books, the government says they prioritise teacher autonomy, the community and interdisciplinary learning. Defenders point out some of the alternative teaching methods are pursued by private universities and expensive Montessori schools and that previous textbooks contained errors.
Teacher autonomy is often highly prized. Because why wouldn’t you want highly capable teachers in your schools? But to be effective, those teachers need to be well-trained and experienced.
Teachers say there has also been little training in the new pedagogical approach.
Pedro Hernández, head of a primary school in Mexico City’s working class Iztapalapa district, said the lack of guidance on reading and writing would force teachers to develop their own methods, as well as change the timetable to accommodate projects.
“We’re talking about 1.5mn teachers in the country who are . . . only just seeing [these books],” he said. “The acid test . . . will be in the classrooms.”
In 2020, the World Bank published Cost-Effective Approaches to Improve Global Learning advising on the best-buys for low- and middle-income countries. The guide had this to say about support for teachers:
The most effective interventions change how teachers teach.
Well, this sounds positive…
Where primary school teaching focuses on rote learning, and teacher knowledge is low step-by-step lesson guides as part of multifaceted instructional programs can help improve pedagogy.
This is where things start to get tricky. The more pragmatic of the dissenting voices have suggested using the student textbooks, but binning the teacher’s guides – which are deemed more radical and political. Whether the teacher’s guides provide this level of support is unclear, but plainly removing a level of support will limit positive impact.
Materials, ongoing training, and monitoring are required in order to enable teachers to use the plans effectively.
All reports are clear – there has been no training or preparation. The old “just add book and hope for the best” approach never works.
A key benefit is that this approach can work even with weak teachers. In such contexts, well-designed interventions like this can support teacher professionalism by reinforcing good content and pedagogy and by freeing teachers to provide their students with more socioemotional support and personalized learning. In a randomized controlled trial (RCT) across 169 rural villages in the Gambia, scripted lesson plans, after-school supplementary classes, and frequent monitoring and teacher coaching dramatically improved learning outcomes. To be effective, the pedagogy needs to be evidence-based and applied at the right level for the students. It is best delivered as system reform, with high level buy-in about what is being taught.
Bonfires of textbooks, highly subscribed online petitions, and judiciary action are not classic indicators of “high level buy-in”…
If the left stay in government, they may have a second chance to make a positive impact in schools through a package of retrospective community engagement, teacher training, and support for schools. But if the right return to power, the curriculum will revert in a heartbeat and the book pyres will only get bigger.
While haste may be politically expedient in the short term, the sad truth is that a lack of planning for the long-term means this is just another lost year of learning for children in Mexico’s schools.
Paulo Freire has a history of inspiring an incendiary reaction amongst the political right in Latin America. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s bombastic right-wing president between 2019 and 2022, claimed he wanted to “enter the Education Ministry with a flamethrower to remove Paulo Freire”.
Those concerns are well-founded. An April 2021 article offers a window on the utter chaos that must have been the development process:
The 2,365 people selected to work on the project, none of whom has previous experience in writing textbooks, will have just two weeks to complete the job, which includes penning primary school texts and workbooks for Spanish, natural sciences, history and geography, among other subjects.
The fact that the books are being published in September 2023 should serve as evidence that the development process did not go as planned…