Never is not an absolute. But it certainly refers to indefinite and prolonged periods of time. Mexico is now experiencing a moment of crucial opportunity for its future. [This critical moment] coexists with a mixture of social tension and wills and opinions that are haphazardly pulling it in all directions regarding the educational issue. While this jumble will not bring blood to the river, it can, certainly, return to its historic state:
"Education reform will never begin."
If we stick to the past, an "arrangement" can be arrive at where the political waters recede back to their normal channels, and appearances say: We achieved education reform!
A few days ago, Luis Videgaray said that productivity in Mexico has been virtually stagnant for the past thirty years. Officials tend to sweep such a grave reality under the carpet. It means that Mexican business people have had to crush Mexican wages in order to retain or increase their profits, especially in a globalized, fiercely competitive world.
Increasing productivity requires public and private investments, and ongoing technological innovation, but these components are almost sterile without a highly educated and skilled society. In Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), Keynes wrote:
"Greed is a vice, the empowerment of usury is a sin, the love of money is despicable ... We will return to newly appreciating promoting the ends over the means, and we will prefer the beautiful over the useful."
These foul warts are today experiencing their highest point, and I also hope that one day we may prefer beauty over utility. That said, I stress that a growing humanization requires both values, and that in Mexico we have done little for the useful, understood in its highest expression: science and technology in all fields of human endeavor.
We appear to be living the conspiracy of opposites: everyone together makes it impossible to open the doors of education that could lead to high moral, aesthetic, scientific, and democratic values, that will bring us to a human and civilized development.
"Although the last word has not been spoken, we are hundreds of thousands of teachers who oppose" the reform of the Constitution, says a "democratic committee" of the SNTE [National Union of Education Workers]. The CNTE [National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers] is on "high alert" and ready to carry out a national strike, if they deem it necessary. Simultaneously the Senate already has a shortlist of five candidates to make up the National Institute of Evaluation, faced with what some anonymous "experts" have said is a question of a political process that will force the proposed specialists to align themselves politically with the educational reform.
Additionally there already appear to be in the Congress three secondary regulatory laws of the reformed constitutional articles, of which we know only that there are three.
Additionally there already appear to be in the Congress three secondary regulatory laws of the reformed constitutional articles, of which we know only that there are three.
The teachers of Oaxaca, Guerrero, some teachers of Morelos, Tabasco and Michoacán--who are waiting to join all the country's teachers--marching right and left, and in some cases committing minor unlawful acts--and in a an increasingly strident voice they express their irritated opposition to education reform. For now their struggles are against pipe dreams and phantoms.
The soul of education is what happens in the classroom. What is happening now in Mexico is a disaster that is primarily what should be reformed: the student-teacher ratio, education content, methods, pedagogical and educational models, and management by teachers who have the knowledge to ensure that their students take ownership. In a nutshell, this is what must be reformed.
But also in ever-widening concentric circles, the institutional organization should be reformed so that it supports the educational process, institutional governance of the school and of the education system, the working conditions in which teachers function, teacher training and the [labor] terms of the teaching profession.
It would be pure demagoguery to argue that any of the actors who live within the current education system are intellectually trained to contribute ideas, knowledge and innovations to contribute to the educational reform.
Teachers of the twenty-first century must be trained Today they cannot be evaluated for anything more than knowing what is the state of affairs in each entity and region in the country. This training must be amply diversified because the gaps that need to be closed are very large.
An educational event is an act of freedom and creativity. But not in the abstract, it is a freedom to achieve concrete results. This requires developing a national core curriculum, with national objectives and general guidelines. At the end of elementary school, students should go through a national evaluation. The scores of this test do not have to be given to students, but to the education authorities in order to adjust their programs so that schools and teachers achieve national objectives.
The states would adapt this general curriculum to the special needs of each state, while leaving space for freedom, so the schools might plan their programs, and the teachers might have the ability to choose the education strategies that they believe necessary--within the framework of modern methods. Together, then, all levels of basic education are designed to work together in order to ensure effective learning in terms of national objectives. Something similar must be done with the middle schools. Spanish original