In Mexico, accusations of ‘communism’ and ‘fascism’ mark college textbook debate

MEXICO CITY — There are few locations the place the controversy over college textbooks has gone so ballistic in such a short while as in Mexico, the place opponents are hurling cries of “communist” and “fascist’ at one another.

The collection of about three dozen government-written, free textbooks will probably be required studying for first via ninth grades in each college nationwide, beginning on Aug. 28.

News anchor Javier Alatorre claimed the brand new schoolbooks written by the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador try to inject “the virus of communism” into youngsters.

Government supporters, in the meantime, have in contrast the opposition to Hitler, after opposition celebration chief Marko Cortes advised a number of the texts needs to be destroyed. Temperatures have run so excessive that López Obrador has instructed officers to carry a collection of reports conferences to reply questions concerning the new texts.

The debate reveals how starkly divided Mexico is between die-hard supporters of López Obrador, and those that hate him.

“What is really being revealed in this conflict, this debate, is how polarized Mexican society is,” stated National University sociologist Ishtar Cardona Cardona, who has reviewed many of the textbooks obtainable to date.

And the ideological debate has obscured the larger undeniable fact that the brand new texts introduce a complete new instructing methodology, one thing by no means earlier than finished in Mexico, the place prior to now, every administration up to date the texts however stored the topics largely the identical.

No longer will there be separate classes – or textbooks – on topics like math, studying or social research. It’s all combined collectively, into multi-subject tales or initiatives, meant to provide a extra hands-on “experiential” studying course of.

There are some embarrassing errors; one grade-school geography lesson mislabels two of Mexico’s 32 states on a map, one other advised ¾ is larger than ⅚ and exhibits an incorrect date of beginning of the nationwide hero Benito Juárez. Yet one other diagram suggests Mars is nearer to the Sun than the Earth is.

And there’s a sturdy anti-capitalist tint to a number of the classes.

There is little doubt that the officers in command of compiling the textbooks do wax nostalgic for the previous Soviet Union. One of the 2 officers proudly bears the primary title “Marx,” and the opposite beforehand labored for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“The Rabfak, the schools for workers in the former Soviet Union, were considered spaces of knowledge. The dream is that Mexican middle schools and their textbooks can achieve that quality,” based on the ahead to the seventh grade language arts e-book.

But Cardona notes that these references “really say more about the I-don’t-want-to-grow-up ideological nostalgia” of the officers, than any actual name to revolution.

Some mother and father agree, like Juan Angoa, who sells belts and wallets at a Mexico City road market.

“This is just pure politics,” stated Angoa.

Angoa, whose youngsters have already graduated from highschool, thinks the controversy distracts from the larger drawback, which is that whereas textbooks are free, uniforms, supplemental books and actions aren’t, representing a problem for low-income mother and father.

For Luz de Teresa Oteysa, researcher on the Institute of Mathematics of the UNAM, the books appeared to have been created with out a lot care, missing the mandatory content material for teenagers, and had been poorly proofread, regardless of any potential new methodology or strategy used.

“Regardless of the government’s ideology or the type of government we have, mathematics must be taught, and even more so, a government that claims to be left-wing,” she stated.

But it’s true that you could find loads of references to capitalism being dangerous within the textbooks, as early because the fourth grade.

One chapter within the fourth grade sciences-math-history textbook is titled “The deterioration of nature and society under capitalist culture.”

Multinational companies, consumerism and imported meals are all depicted as inherently dangerous.

That is a priority for fogeys like Husim Pérez Valladares, whose daughter is coming into kindergarten this yr.

“There has never been so much concern about textbooks,” Pérez Valladares stated as her daughter performed on a bench subsequent to her. “They’re saying there are a lot of subliminal, pro-communist messages” within the books.

What is maybe extra important is that the texts are inclined to rewrite historical past and embody the political stances of López Obrador’s administration as gospel.

For instance, most historians agree that Mexico’s “Dirty War” – a counterinsurgency effort by Mexican troopers and police towards leftist rebels – ran from about 1965 to 1995. By 2000, Mexico’s presidents started investigating crimes of the previous.

But the brand new textbooks say it ran from the Fifties to 2016, simply two years earlier than López Obrador took workplace. (While López Obrador typically invokes Cuba and insurgent actions of the previous, he has finished little or no that’s overtly leftist throughout his tenure.)

López Obrador dislikes mainstream media retailers, and it exhibits. One textbook tells youngsters “if you are looking (for reliable information) on the internet, the webpage’s address should end in .edu, .gob or .org.” That excludes most newspapers in Mexico, which use “.com” addresses for his or her on-line editions.

Cardona says this isn’t the primary time an administration’s biases have crept into mandated college textbooks.

“I grew up with free textbooks that talked about the current president or the one before,” stated Carmona. “This is a defect of Mexico as a country. Putting yourself in the textbooks is nothing new.”

The extra major problem, Cardona says, was the push to get the error-prone textbooks completed earlier than López Obrador leaves workplace in September 2024.