MEXICO CITY (CN) — While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wages his culture war in that state’s classrooms, a similar controversy over school curricula is playing out in Mexico’s national politics.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has vowed to implement an educational reform that includes new textbooks that critics say lack scientific and pedagogic integrity.
The debate found its way into the ongoing clash between Mexico’s executive and judicial branches Tuesday when López Obrador denied the existence of a court order to halt distribution and amend the textbooks.
“There is no writ of amparo that impedes the distribution of the book,” he said during his morning press conference in Mexico City. Amparo is a type of appeal in Mexican law similar to habeas corpus.
He vowed to have the books ready and in classrooms for the start of the new semester on Aug. 28.
Rooting her decision in the country’s amparo law, a Mexico City administrative district court judge ordered a definitive suspension of the books’ the production in May.
On Monday, the judge gave Mexico’s Public Education Secretariat (SEP) 24 hours to respect the court order, saying that “the responsible authorities have neglected to fully comply regarding the definitive suspension issued in the proceedings.”
The SEP said in an email exchange that it “had not been officially notified [of the amparo] and it is working on the corresponding legal mechanism.”
The ruling was issued on May 25 and a partially redacted copy was easily found via a Google search of the file number cited Tuesday in several Mexican news outlets. Courthouse News included a link to the legal document in its request for comment.
Despite its claim to ignorance of the amparo, the SEP said that “it has scrupulously complied with judicial requirements" and that it would soon publish the study programs that make up the new textbooks “in observance of the principle of legality.”
Among the critics of the new textbooks are parents’ rights groups like the National Union of Parents, who question the pedagogy behind them and filed the legal challenge that let to the writ of amparo after not being allowed to review the material.
The organization said on social media that the new learning materials have “scientific and pedagogic deficiencies” and that Mexico’s teachers have not been trained to apply the new standards.
Parents, educators and pedagogy specialists were not consulted before the new books were printed, said Israel Sánchez, the organization’s director, in a phone interview just weeks before the start of the new school year. The books have already been sent to schools across the country, but at least two states — Jalisco and Guanajuato — have reported that they will not use them.
“By law, we have the right to be able to give our input before printing, not afterward,” said Sánchez.
The president’s propaganda apparatus and his blatant disregard for publicly available court documents, Sánchez said, are “why it is important to finish school on time and to have a well-structured education system, because people are easily misled.”
López Obrador took 14 years to finish his bachelor’s degree at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, during which time he failed courses on political science, economics and other subjects several times.
The textbooks have not yet been made public, but education researchers in Mexico not involved in their creation who have seen them ahead of the new school year have called them out for being biased, confusing and factually incorrect.
Alma Maldonado, a research professor at the National Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies tweeted a leaked page from a fifth grade science textbook that depicts a flawed order of the planets of our solar system. Earth appears to be somewhere near Saturn’s orbit in the diagram, and Jupiter and Mars are clearly closer to the sun.
In another thread of tweets, Maldonado pointed out lessons that appear to show bias toward López Obrador’s political and economic agenda.
“According to this book, the main cause of inequality … is capitalism,” she said of a first grade textbook called “Ethics, Nature and Societies.”
“Of course, that is one explanation and has important foundations, but it is not the only one,” she continued. “In non-capitalist societies there is also inequality. The book does not say this.”
The books have also been said to praise the Cuban Revolution without covering the ensuing brutal dictatorship. It also reportedly teaches schoolchildren about the “electoral fraud” of Mexico’s 2006 presidential race that López Obrador claims cost him the election that year, but was never proven to have taken place.
Math lessons said to be in the new curricula have people particularly worried. A columnist for Milenio Tuesday noted the incomplete definition of geometrical shapes as “segments of straight lines, angles and vertices,” calling the description “foolishness that excludes the circle” and other round geometric forms.
Legal scholars see in López Obrador’s statements Tuesday an escalation in hostilities between Mexico’s executive and judicial branches. The president has sparred with the judiciary over issues such as electoral reform, mandatory pretrial detention, alleged corruption and other issues. He has even squabbled over issues of pay, claiming Supreme Court justices “earn four, five times what I earn.”
In May, he proposed the idea to reform the judiciary to elect Supreme Court justices by popular vote.
“We’re going to see more confrontation like this in the coming months,” said Sergio López Ayllón, a law professor at the Mexico City-based think tank CIDE, in a phone interview.
López Obrador is opting for a dismantlement of democratic institutions in lieu of force, said López Ayllón, who predicted that Mexico will only see more “authoritarian characteristics without counterweights” ahead of what promises to be a contentions election year in 2024.
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