[lg policy] 'Normalistas' protest the teaching of English and computer skills to rural mexican children

[Harold Schiffman]

'Normalistas' fight changes in Mexican education
David Agren, Special for USA TODAY8:11a.m. EST December 9, 2012



    The students have protested the teaching of English and computer
skills to rural children

MORELIA, Mexico — College student Eduardo Díaz considers his
participation in protests to be as much a part of his higher education
as classwork.

For weeks, Díaz and other students who are going to school to become
teachers in rural Mexico occupied the historic center of this colonial
town — along with a bevy of farm animals, a tractor and a foosball
table — to protest attempts to modernize their courses.

"The social struggle, along with basic education ... we learn both,"
says Díaz, 22.

New President Enrique Peña Nieto says one of his priorities will be
the overhauling of Mexico's education system to promote skills needed
for the 21st century. But to do so he must confront the rural outposts
of the Normal schools, the colleges where professors have for decades
been training aspiring teachers in activist politics, Marxism and
social justice.

In many areas of rural Mexico, these college students known as
"normalistas" have taken to the streets and hijacked buses in
sometimes violent protests against any changes to the education
system. Some protests have been going for months.

Encouraged by their professors, the students have protested the
teaching of English and computer skills to rural children. They've
demonstrated against the strengthening of teacher evaluations, changes
to labor laws and the elimination of the practice of allowing teachers
to sell their jobs to the highest bidder.

"(The normalistas) want the old rules of the past to persist," says
David Calderón, director of the education advocacy group Mexicanos
Primero. "That's at the bottom of this."

Established after the 1910 revolution, the rural Normal schools were
created by the Institutional Revolutionary Party to calm rural and
indigenous areas and to use teachers to blunt the influence of the
Catholic Church, viewed with suspicion by anti-clerical
revolutionaries.

Normal schools in urban areas have updated curriculum to adapt to the
times and desires of students and parents. But the rural teacher
college students and their protests persist as anachronisms as a more
modern Mexico passes them by.

Peña Nieto, who was inaugurated Dec. 1, ran on a platform of improving
economic performance in part by changing the education system. In his
inaugural address he vowed to end the practice of teachers treating
their positions like personal property, in which they can sell their
job upon retirement. He also pledged to improve teacher evaluations
and training.

Mexican students score among the lowest in the standardized tests
supervised by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development. But proposals for change have been floated in the past
and dropped following protests from teachers and students alike.
Strikes in states such as Oaxaca and Michoacán are common as is
allowing teachers to work for union political projects instead of
classroom work.

In Morelia, Díaz and his fellow teaching students don't want English
or computer training added to their curriculum. They disagree that the
skills are needed in the remote regions of Michoacán.

This rugged state, which unfolds across western Mexico, is home to
indigenous Purépecha Indians and a region where every winter 100
million monarch butterflies fly into Mexico from the U.S. and Canada.
It has also been a battleground in the crackdown on drug cartels and
organized crime.

English education in Mexico is taught in public schools beginning in
kindergarten, but not in rural areas here.

"What do you do (with English) in these schools where the kids don't
even speak Spanish?" asks normalista Carlos Pedraza, 21.

Pedraza says that they tried to convince the government of the
rightness of their position.

"They didn't listen so we had to take more radical action, like
hijacking buses," he says.

Federal police raided the Escuela Normal Rural de Vasco de Quiroga on
Oct. 15 and apprehended 49 normalistas for allegedly burning some of
the hijacked buses.

In the state of Guerrero, home to Acapulco, students have blocked the
Mexico City-Acapulco highway, stolen buses and taken over radio
stations to stop changes such as the guaranteed lifetime jobs that can
be bequeathed or sold to others.
None

In the face of the normalista protests, the federal government backed
down on plans to introduce English instruction.

Normalistas, many of whom speak the Purépecha language, say they
deserve the perks Peña Nieto wants to eliminate because they must
teach in neglected schools that lack roofs, running water and
electricity.

Peña Nieto belongs to the PRI, which controlled Mexico politics
uninterrupted for 71 years until 2000. So it is his own party that
created and continued the education policies he says he wants changed,
and previous presidents have caved to normalista demands in the face
of violence and vandalism.

"They've found that this an effective way to exercise political
power," education researcher Marco Antonio Fernández says. "Being
violent pays off."

Calderón says Peña Nieto faces a significant challenge in confronting
the rural teachers. The perks they receive have been part of a "grand
bargain" between rural students and past governments for years,
guaranteeing political support and quiet.

Michoacán teachers, allies of the normalistas, cut classes for
frequent protests and "increasingly own the (state) public education
secretariat," says Isaac Reyes, editor of the Michoacán news wire
Quadratín.

The crusade against English, technology and other changes will only
hurt those they are trying to help, he says.

"Those who don't know English and computation are the illiterates of
the 21st century," Reyes says.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/08/mexico-teachers/1748405/

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