New education system will prepare students to share, not compete
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- 04 Jul 2022
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The federal government’s new curriculum model will teach students to share rather than be competitive, according to the Ministry of Public Education (SEP).
Marx Arriaga, SEP’s director of educational materials, said Tuesday that existing textbooks will be scrapped under the new model because they promote neoliberal concepts and that students won’t be required to sit international standardized tests such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s PISA tests – and educational objectives will be aligned with the ideals of the Fourth Transformation, or 4T, a byword both for the ruling government and the vast change it says it is bringing to Mexico.
PISA tests are benchmarking exams to assess school performance in which students respond to approximately two hours of test questions in reading, mathematics and science and answer a 30-minute student questionnaire. The school’s principal and other directors also provide information on their educational institution by filling out a questionnaire.
Mexico’s new educational model’s curriculum will place much greater emphasis on sharing and the common good than pitting individual students against each other, Arriaga said.
The model, which is still being developed, will be “libertarian” and “humanist” and put an end to racism in the education system and “standardized tests that segregate society,” he said.
Speaking at President López Obrador’s morning news conference, the SEP official used a long list of adjectives to describe the existing “neoliberal” education model, including “punitive, racist, Eurocentric, colonial, inhumane, classist, elitist and patriarchal.”
He charged that education has become a business in Mexico “that absorbs billions of pesos a year” and is used to legitimize societal problems such as classism.
While the new education model hasn’t yet been introduced, Arriaga said that the Education Ministry — which he charged had become a “bureaucratized and dehumanized institution” — has been “re-engineered” over the past three years. The educational materials chief has dedicated much of his time to overseeing the process to develop new textbooks that confine neoliberalism — one of López Obrador’s professed pet hates — to the dustbin of history. Teachers have played a key role in the process. Read More...
