Some parents and politicians are putting up a fight
cause controversy. Parents object to what they teach children about sex. History can be ideologically charged. Maps sometimes provoke anger in neighbouring countries. But rarely have textbooks caused such an uproar as in Mexico, when the government issued new books for the start of the school year on August 28th. The governors of several states refused to distribute them. Parents have burned them.
When the state writes the textbooks, the government can impose its ideology on schools. That has been especially true since 1980, when the education ministry took over direct responsibility for writing the books from a semi-independent body .It is perhaps no surprise that Mexico’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is taking full advantage of the opportunity. He sees himself as a transformational leader, and textbooks are a cheap way to bring about big changes.
More contentiously, students will now be schooled in Mr López Obrador’s ideology. The books denounce individualism, capitalism and “neoliberalism”, which allegedly “has eliminated worker gains”, says one. They extol the president’s pet building projects, including a museum and an airport in Mexico City. One of the officials who directed the textbooks’ composition is a Venezuelan who used to work for Hugo Chávez, that country’s late left-wing dictator.
The new curriculum is also a pedagogical mess, says Marco Fernández of México Evalúa, a think-tank. Subjects will no longer be taught separately. Instead, children are to learn through interdisciplinary projects. More interactive learning is a good thing, says Eugenia Roldán of Cinvestav, a research body on education, but not everything can be taught that way. The new curriculum drastically reduces the teaching of maths and Spanish.
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