Students from eleven entities in the country begin the 2023-2024 school year this Monday with educational materials prepared by local governments, or with the texts they took last year, because they maintain their position of not distributing the controversial new books issued by the Ministry of Public Education (SEP).
This means that at least 45% of the boys and girls who attend primary and secondary schools throughout the country will not study with the texts recently published by the educational authorities of the federal government.
The entities that will leave the new books in the warehouses are Jalisco, Guanajuato, Nuevo León, Aguascalientes, the State of Mexico, Baja California, Tamaulipas, Querétaro, Yucatán, Chihuahua and Coahuila.
In these states, the primary and secondary school population amounts to 8 million 840,268 students, out of a total of 19 million 556,893 students who attended these levels in Mexico in the 2022-2023 cycle, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography ( Inegi).
The numbers are high because the State of Mexico has the largest student population in our country, with just over 2.5 million children in the two aforementioned levels. It is followed by Jalisco, with a total of 1.32 million students, and Nuevo León with 858,944 students.
The texts of the SEP they no longer include the subjects of mathematics and Spanish, they have important errors and omissions, their content is disordered and partial, and they show an ideologized version of reality. And the same happens with the new Curriculum, which will be in force from this Monday in the country’s public schools.
Both the Plan and the corresponding Programs, which by law should have been disclosed before the free textbooks, downplay the importance of science and technical advancesand introduce a utilitarian vision of the few mathematics that will be taught in schools.
Additionally, to prepare the books, the Plan and the Programs, the SEP did not consult the educational authorities of the states, nor parents, as established in the tenth paragraph of article 3 of the Constitution and various numerals of the General Education Law.
Political and legal decisions
The governments of the states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Querétaro and Yucatán decided not to distribute the new books because they do not agree with their content or with the procedures followed for their issuance by the SEP.
In addition, at least in the case of Jalisco, this decision was made because a definitive suspension granted to the National Union of Family Parents (UNPF) is in force, with which a federal judge ordered that the texts not be distributed throughout the country. , a provision that the Federal Education Secretariat has not complied with.
On their side, in Baja California, Tamaulipas and the State of Mexico, various civil organizations, and the National Action Party (PAN), promoted individual Amparo Trials in which they already provisional suspensions were obtained so that the texts are not distributed in those demarcations.
With respect to Chihuahua and Coahuila, their governments obtained the same precautionary measure from the minister of the Supreme Court Luis Maria Aguilar Morales, who will be in charge of analyzing the Constitutional Controversies that these entities filed in the country’s highest court.
It should be clarified that in these Constitutional Controversies, and in all Amparo Trials filed against the texts, the plaintiffs do not question their content, but the procedure followed by the SEP in the renewal of the materials, since the dependency did not observe the guidelines to which it is obliged in this matter.
In fact, the National Union of Family Parents (UNPF) has already won the amparo that it filed since May against the books, since the SEP followed an unconstitutional procedure for its drafting, in accordance with the sentence issued by the judge Yadira Elizabeth Medina Alcantara.
With this last determination, the togada ordered the SEP to distribute the books of the previous cycle 2022-2023, in coordination with the educational authorities of the states, so that Mexican children do not run out of study materials.
Contempt of the SEP
To prepare the new books, and modify the Plans and Study Programs of the basic level, the SEP had to follow various formalities provided for in the Constitution and in the General Education Law. Since you did not meet those requirements, in fact, the texts are unconstitutional, regardless of their content.
The most important omission of the educational authorities is the one that refers to the obligatory democratic deliberation to which the new materials had to be submitted. Instead of making the respective consultations with experts in the field, state governments and parent groups, the SEP decided, unilaterally, to implement a profound educational reform that it has called the “New Mexican School”.
Added to these transgressions is the opacity of the entire process carried out by the agency, since it reserved for five years the content of the books and the details of the steps carried out for their preparation.
Although the volumes can now be consulted on the website of the National Commission for Free Textbooks, the rest of the information -which should be public- remains classified as confidential.
With this, the “New Mexican School” is practically an authoritarian imposition of the federal government, since the SEP implements it without complying with what the law and the Magna Carta establish, and in contempt of all court orders.
MORE NEWS:
surya palaces Journalist and lawyer, specialist in legal analysis and human rights. She has been a reporter, radio host and editor.