The conspicuous presence of young people and children in matters relating to organized crime, the proclivity to violence by youth groups--whether in politics and mass mobilization as happened last December First, or the everyday outbursts, the vandalism, scattered or not, aggressive and open, as has happened again at the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico]; in short, the stories, the facts and figures that add color and life to the inertia of the millions of boys who neither study nor work [NiNi's], should constitute firsthand arguments, prima facie the jurist would say, in favor of substantive action regarding the education emergency.
However, if we pay attention to the dominant rhetoric of the teachers' protest in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán, both by the protesters and by local and federal authorities, it doesn't seem that education is what's in play, but rather each side's interpretations of what are their rights, powers and privileges, as understood by apologists for each side. What and how to instruct and educate; and why, are basic questions that merit nothing more than vague and general answers, if not strident and stentorian ones that turn into self-help slogans ....
Warnings issued one and another day by the Secretary of Education bump up against the bluster and claims by leaders of the CNTE [National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers; dissident wing of Teachers Union] and its branches with derived acronyms, to form a scenario of zero-sum confrontations that can only be broken by the path of a rational, national dialogue that cannot be reduced to an exchange between rooster and hen. Fortunately, in the Congress we already have initiatives about constitutional reforms for secondary [middle and high school] legislation, where the fingernails of the devil and the teachers and various crusaders for "quality" education will be seen (or not) and who will have to show something more than their respective ingenuity and wit.
According to fashion and the dominant culture, 'they' have tried to "sell" national education reform by appealing to its economic potential: thanks to education--of high quality, of course--Mexico will be more and more competitive, Mexico will become the indomitable jaguar and will eat the Asian dragons. It will be thanks to the fruits of the new education, that companies will gain value and forge unbreakable chains of efficiency and, even more, systemic competitiveness. It will be, in short, thanks to education that we will be good, free and the best.
The truth is it is too much to ask this from a few processes whose results cannot be seen or received, much less used in the short or medium term. Neither can they be expected to function, in general, as miracle drugs and lead to the productive and economic transformations that governments and business classes have not undertaken for decades, but instead have counteracted with the worst stupidity in economic policy by reducing it to acts of stabilization without paying any attention to what is the key to economic progress: capital accumulation and technological innovation.
The most serious aspect of the national educational tragedy is the state's forgetting or sidestepping the condition in which the irreplaceable raw material of the entire educational process is found. Without acknowledging the state of disaster in which today millions of homes in the countryside and in the city are found; without admitting and putting at the center [of the debate] the adult poverty and impoverishment [surrounding] the children of Mexico; without recognizing the other tragedy that came with our savage modernization in recent decades, summed up in the erosion of infant and child care and the non-existence of substitutes for the role of mothers tied up in wage labor, such as occurs in the north in the maquilas [assembly plants]--[without addressing these issues,] the country will not be able--neither the government nor the CNTE, with their members and opportunistic allies and hangers-on--to give educational reform the transformative dimension that all of us assume it should have.
In the best of cases, it will be a power play that will be the most atrocious of dismissive insults, because it will be about the future of today's children.
This has been documented for everyone to see, without our making the slightest case, by the UNICEF and the National Evaluation of Social Policy, in its crushing report "Poverty and Social Rights of Children and Adolescents in Mexico, 2008-2010". As Mario Luis Fuentes postulates in the journal Social Mexico in its April issue,
"Mexico is unsuitable for children and (hence), it is a country unsuitable for everyone" (Social Mexico, 04/13, Editorial, p. 2).
Spanish original
*Rolando Cordera graduated in Economics from the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico], with postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics. Named Professor Emeritus by the UNAM and Doctor Honoris Causa by the UAM [Metropolitan Autonomous University], Cordero has since 2002 been a researcher at the National System of Researchers. A weekly contributor to La Jornada, he is also a member of the Institute for the Study of Democratic Transition and the Mexican Academy of Economics.