Curriculum in gibberish 2023/10/01

The amazement has no brakes. The Ministry of Public Education built the 2022 curriculum for preschool, primary and secondary education in fits and starts in order to legitimize the new generation of free textbooks. He did it in haste, due to popular demand and regulatory obligation, not because it was his intention. The result: a 192-page tome written so that few would understand it.

Among the analyzes that circulate, I was captivated by Alberto Sánchez Cervantes, Five notes on the 2022 Study Plan (Future Education, 09/29/23). It is a sober review, without diatribes or sarcasm. It shows that the language of the curriculum—which teachers are supposed to read as a guide to their work—is stilted and difficult to understand, when it is supposed, by its nature, “to be brief, simple prose, concise and clear.” ”. The trial of Sanchez Cervantes is severe: “It is a text that generates drowsiness and discourages the reader, even the most seasoned.”

The magazine of Sanchez Cervantes was exhaustive, it documents with great care the extrapolations that the authors made when justifying their assertions with references to essayists who judge failures in other countries and not in the immediate past of the Mexican educational system. And he criticizes the criticism made by the creators of textbooks about the consequences of the pandemic, based on a volume of Jurjo Torres Santoméfrom 2011(Curriculum justice). A passage that may be well composed, but it is extemporaneous.

Sanchez Cervantes It also contains fallacious arguments in the SEP books. Fallacies, as is known, apart from being an anomaly in the logic of grammatical construction, are dangerous because they lend themselves to deception, since they prepare arguments that may seem convincing. It lists several passages where falsehoods about the functioning of schools and the actions of teachers are evident, in addition to the content of previous textbooks.

Critical pedagogy, southern epistemologies and the writings of Paulo Freire They are the primary sources that feed ideology into the study plan, textbooks and those intended for teaching. Sanchez Cervantes concludes: “From its ideological scope, the reform is sectarian, since it unintentionally excludes teachers who do not identify with the theses of the so-called epistemologies of the south.” Perhaps a large majority.

Finally, the critic of the reform states the cumbersomeness of the notes (354 in total, 2.3 on average per page) and references (280) with a predominance of works by Angel Diaz Barrigawho told us in a conversation that he was the promoter of the change in the curriculum and the main author of the new textbooks. Sanchez Cervantes concludes: “It is difficult to accept that teachers and other actors participating in the analysis assemblies organized by Marx Arriaga have endorsed this document.” As I said, the plan is pure gibberish.