The cult of textbooks 2022/06/01

In the proposal of the Ministry of Public Education of the “New curricular framework and study plan for Mexican basic education”, it puts the common as the articulating axis of future study plans and programs and the community, not the school, as the space of the teaching and learning process. Despite the rhetoric full of adjectives and morning phrases, he points out criticism of some value, although the bets on change do not seem to be going to improve education.

It censors the (neoliberal) educational reforms and the current textbooks: “The basic contents in the different curricular reforms from 1992 to 2017 have had more weight than the definition of the national curriculum, resulting in…”. And then he raises the bet for the immediate future: “Textbooks are prepared for teachers, when they should focus on students.”

Indeed, colleagues who work in the field of curriculum and teacher training argue that the cult of texts as a source of truth, in a certain way, sacralizes official knowledge. Teachers tend to emphasize what the books mention and, with few exceptions, do not question the veracity of those judgments. And this also happens to future teachers during their years of study, with the aggravating circumstance that teacher educators describe most of the texts as mediocre.

To be clear. They do not object to textbooks, national or foreign, since they are indispensable for any educational system. What they criticize is that they are taken as the privileged sources of knowledge and any other aspiration to learn is denied. This has resulted in children and young people getting used to repeating and memorizing certain content, instead of posing problems and providing mechanisms for them to use their intellectual resources to solve them. This generates passivity in teaching, leads not to learning, but to the recitation of words and ideas that do not become concepts in the minds of students. To this is added that they are not active agents in the learning process, since they are not taught to unravel the secrets of nature, the forms of language, the problems of mathematics or the elements that govern society, but rather they are offered recipes that they must learn almost by heart. And memorization, as far as is known, is the only thing that is graded in Mexican schools.

Digested knowledge, memorization and lack of experimentation are the dominant features in the teaching methods that imply that, even if the academic objectives were met, the entire program was covered and the students remembered the contents well, the quality of education would be better, although increase the approval rates of subjects.

The bet of the Fourth Transformation does not propose a fundamental change, it reproduces the cult of textbooks: “…the plan, the study programs, the textbooks and other official educational materials for basic education at all levels , grades and modalities, will have an intercultural approach that crosses the entire curricular map, its training processes, evaluation, school management, educational materials and technologies.

The novelty is that in the elaboration —says the project— the indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities will participate, and will consider the opinion of those who represent the diversity of gender, class, sexuality, ability. It also invites the magisterium.

The purpose: to build a new official knowledge that sacralizes community traditions while degrading the school and the textbooks that, although sparse, bear fruit.

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