Translated by Tammy Nolan
A study by the National Educational Evaluation Institute reveals slow advances in educational coverage and literacy. In 2010, there were 5 million Mexicans at 15 years of age and older that did not know how to write even a message.
Efforts to achieve full coverage in college, high school, middle and elementary school education, as well as the literacy of all Mexicans are advancing slowly, and lack of attendance in school is mainly concentrated in the lower income population and indigenous areas.
These conclusions are part of the results presented by the National Education Evaluation Institute (NEEI) in their study, Educational Panorama of México, in which they indicate that a gender gap between men and women who finish higher education also persists.
The document, which was sent to the Chamber of Deputies, emphasizes that
“it is evident that conditions of origin are associated with possibilities to attend school”, and that fewer women finish a university degree “probably because a large part of them are engaged as mothers or housewives.”In the case of illiteracy, the study covers the time period of 2000 to 2010, and the NEEI states that this problem
“reflects the degree to which society still drags along bad habits from a past which it has been trying to leave behind for a long time.”In this decade, the report explains, even if illiteracy fell an average of 0.27 percent annually, going from 9.5 to 6.8 percent of the population, “this rate is still insufficient to clearly reach the goal of 5 percent by 2015”, as has been proposed by the Organization of Ibero-american States.
The study concludes that the level of socio-economic development of each state is related to the percent of illiteracy that it faces. For example, in 2010, the states with the highest percentage of illiteracy were Chiapas, with 18.3 percent; Guerrero, 16.2 percent; and Oaxaca, 16.2 percent. These states were also classified as having a very high degree of marginalization in the National Population Council records and with the lowest rate of social development according to the National Statistics and Geography Institute.
So, it explains, in 2010, there were 5.3 million Mexicans aged 15 years or older that did not know how to read or write a message, only 600,000 fewer than in 2000, of which 2.1 million are men and 3.3 million are women.
It detailed that in the past 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, the population has been able to improve the average number of years in school
“only at a rate of 0.13 grades per year, going from 3.4 to 8.6; so, the population as a whole went from completing only a little over half of elementary education to almost all of middle school.”However, the document reveals that the population of 30 to 34-year olds having at least completed the bachelor’s degree went up significantly between 2000 and 2010, going from 11.3 to 17.5 percent....
The Educational Panorama of México shows that the Federal District [Mexico City] placed first, ahead of all the states, in graduates with bachelor’s degrees, “which gives an idea of the efforts of the city” to advance to the highest levels of education. Spanish original