What is the New Mexican School?
And why the 4T's educational crusader went to war with the government
Welcome to The Mexpatriate.
President Claudia Sheinbaum began the week with a migraine, and his name is Marx Arriaga.
Arriaga was the lead architect of the “Nueva Escuela Mexicana” (New Mexican School or NEM), an educational model designed to bring the ideals of López Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation” into the classroom. He served as the director of educational materials at the Department of Public Education (SEP) from 2021 until last Friday, Feb. 13, when he accused security guards of attempting to “evict” him from his office; he then dared them to arrest him “for the crime of making textbooks.” Secretary of Education Mario Delgado confirmed that Arriaga had been let go, though he had been offered the standard consolation prize for undesirable officials: an embassy abroad.
But Arriaga is no diplomat. He refused to leave his office for over 100 hours, claiming he hadn’t been properly notified of his termination. His replacement, Nadia López, was announced on Monday, but Arriaga held out until Tuesday afternoon when he received an official dismissal letter and finally departed—carrying a portrait of Karl Marx under his arm.
Sheinbaum told the press on Monday that Arriaga (who had been hurling insults at the “sewage” of the SEP for months on X) had refused to consider any modifications to the NEM textbooks, despite requests from teachers and his superiors. She emphasized that the textbooks don’t belong to any individual, while also defending Arriaga and his work as a loyal member of the 4T—undoubtedly, trying to minimize the opening of an internal rift in Morena. According to the president, the first disagreement arose over the inclusion of more women in the textbooks. However, Arriaga has denied this, claiming instead that he was asked to remove historical events like the 2014 Ayotzinapa atrocity and the “guerra sucia” of the 1960s-1980s.
“A textbook is a living tool, an instrument of support for teachers and students in their education; therefore, it must always be subject to updates and improvements,” read a statement from the SEP published on Feb. 14.
As Arriaga dug in and lashed out at what he claims are “neoliberal” attempts to destroy AMLO’s legacy, Morena’s opponents were almost giddy as spectators of the showdown. Not only have they lambasted the 4T for laying waste to Mexican education for years, they are also hoping for a civil war within the ruling party.
In tonight’s edition, I’m republishing a piece I wrote about the NEM when it first kicked up controversy in 2022. At the time, the new textbooks were on the cusp of being distributed in the country’s pandemic-gutted schools, causing a moral panic (verging on a red scare) and a flurry of lawsuits. Over three years later, the effects of the NEM are hard to assess since the government shuttered the independent agencies that had previously evaluated school system performance. However, Mexico did participate (under duress) in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2025 and the survey results—testing math, reading and science skills—will be published later this year.
The state of education in Mexico and “La Nueva Escuela Mexicana”
Originally published on Nov. 8, 2022
On Oct. 19, 2022 the Department of Public Education (SEP) temporarily suspended a pilot program to implement a new curriculum in 960 public schools. This followed rulings by federal judges in favor of lawsuits brought against the program.
The judges essentially accused the institution of using students as guinea pigs “to determine the pros and cons of the new educational model, without taking into account the negative repercussions this could have on these students’ rights to an education.”
The department has announced they will challenge the rulings.
As the SEP has changed hands (a new director was announced in August) and confronts (or attempts to dodge) an acute educational crisis in the wake of the pandemic, the decision to implement comprehensive curriculum changes seems misguided at best. However, from the hurried perspective of a president whose lofty ideological aspirations and mega-projects have been truncated by global events, there is no time to waste.
“It is the dream of all specialists in pedagogy from the left…imagining a different kind of education, where the student is not a product, where everything isn’t made into a business…but rather is community-based,” said director of educational materials, Marx Arriaga, in a recent interview. When the outline of the program was announced in May of this year, Arriaga described the many sins the curriculum sought to remedy —classism, racism, misogyny—but provided few details about how exactly this would be achieved.
Some critics were appalled by what they viewed as a curriculum focused on “indoctrination” more than education. The impetus behind the self-described “Nueva Escuela Mexicana” is to bring the crusade against neoliberalism into the classroom, to shift the focus from “competencias” (competition or competence) to “compartencias”. This latter addition to the Spanish language (a play on the word “to share”) doesn’t appear to have the capitalists too frightened yet.
Following the failure to launch the program, Arriaga took his beleaguered textbooks on the road last week, initiating a “caravan” to promote the curriculum across the nation. Arriaga has claimed that Mexico would be the first country to try this alternative approach to public education in history; the goal being nothing less than to “decolonize” the minds of the next generation of Mexicans, liberating them from centuries of European structures of thought.
So what is different about this curriculum? Does it really set out to brainwash students into mini-AMLOs promoting the “Cuarta Transformación” as some fear? Or will it inspire a “revolution of consciousness” as claimed by Arriaga?
“The fundamental point of the connection between the content and the core concepts in a subject is achieved through instruction, which situates the points of articulation of the knowledge and understanding within teaching contexts (in which the teacher brings to bear his or her teaching knowledge) and learning situations applied to the daily life of the students.”
After 162 pages of this, I’m not sure how to answer the questions above, but the general takeaways are:
Community
Plurality
Inclusion
Human rights
Grades are grouped together and labeled as “phases” and subjects are “educational fields,” which are supposed to be taught via a form of project-based learning.
“The intention is not to teach knowledge, values and attitudes so that children and adolescents can assimilate and adapt to the society they belong to, neither is the function of school to mold human capital from primary to higher education in response to the needs established by the labor market. Schools should create happy children and adolescents.”
Student and teacher evaluations are also modified in the plan, with a focus on “feedback,” “dialogue” and “self-reflection” rather than the “supposed quantification of knowledge that can be represented by numerical grades.” If the priority is happy students, I suppose it’s hard to argue with this approach.
The document also makes pointed reference to earlier attempts at educational reform: “…the rhetoric of quality as the basis for reducing the education of students and the work of teachers to instrumental criteria…opened the doors to the commercialization of primary education.”
The 2013 constitutional reform under President Enrique Peña Nieto looked to standardized testing, teacher evaluations and the weakening of the teacher’s union as mechanisms to improve outcomes on metrics that Mexico’s students had repeatedly failed. López Obrador reversed the reform in 2019.
As pundits and politicians argue about the ideological ramifications of this plan, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the recent debates playing out across schools in the U.S., which similarly reveal the tension between a proclaimed desire to create a more equitable society via textbook, and the messy reality of superimposing top-down change.
In Mexico, the focus has been on class more than race, and to a lesser extent, on gender. But in both countries, the diversity of schools across vastly heterogenous and unequal societies can create barriers to change that educators or policymakers may not anticipate. It turns out that families often prioritize the individual needs and aspirations of their children over the more abstract interests of society.
I feel I can approach this topic as a less excitable outsider, one who comprehends deeply the arguments for alternative education. I was home-educated from first grade through high school, which is one of the reasons our family had the flexibility to travel back and forth to Mexico. My sisters and I enjoyed more freedom than our peers—days were not as routine, we could always visit museums or libraries during off hours—and we were the beneficiaries of a highly individualized education. My daughters attend a very small Waldorf-inspired private school, which at times strikes me as a cross between Hogwarts and Little House on the Prairie. And yes, I believe in protecting the fleeting magic, imagination and wonder of childhood, a gift I was granted during my own.
Is this gift a luxury, a privilege for those who can afford it? Or is it a brave middle finger in the face of conformity? Perhaps it is both.
Over the years I have come to understand how much of my singular childhood was enabled by circumstance: I grew up in a one-income household, with my mother at home. I came from at least two generations of college graduates. My sisters and I were not at risk of being shut out from many opportunities, even if we learned algebra, literature and science at a different pace and in different ways than our peers. Instead of viewing public educational systems simply as tools of conformity and creatures of industrialism, I now see their profound value as a public good; a besieged but valiant effort to provide equal access to what has historically been off limits to most of humankind.
What we teach in schools has always been subject to ideological meddling, controversy and the zeitgeist of the era. What we take for granted in today’s textbooks may have been considered uncouth, heretical or dangerous only a few generations ago.
This reform by the AMLO administration is a logical extension of the philosophy driving the “4T.” In a sense, the structure of modern schooling is anathema to their vision of a just society and when critics call out the importance of public education as a tool for social mobility, they may respond “so what?” Isn’t that really a euphemism that keeps the capitalist illusion in place? The concept of social mobility is rooted in the notion that acquiring certain education and skills will help you level up in this game we play, allowing one to aspire beyond humble origins, to detach from the moorings of class and “be free.”
Is this how it usually plays out in reality? It would be hard to answer “yes” in modern Mexico.
Here are a few sobering statistics from a 2019 study on social mobility:
74 of 100 Mexicans from the poorest segment of society will never break out of poverty in their lifetimes.
Only 5% of children whose parents who didn’t attend school will obtain a college degree; and just 13% will complete high school.
Meanwhile, a representative from UNICEF recently put the educational regression in Mexico in stark terms: a 2021 assessment of 1600 students (8-11 years old) revealed that 66% had not achieved basic reading skills, and 97% lacked basic math skills. “We are talking about educational consequences that will turn into income and quality of life consequences…a generation of students may never recover the years of learning lost.”
The promises of social mobility may be broken for many, but are the promises of new textbooks and new terminology any more likely to endure?
Since I wrote this piece, my daughters have moved to a SEP-incorporated private school, where I’ve seen firsthand the sometimes awkward marriage between the social justice spirit of the NEM and a business-minded school culture that lauds entrepreneurship.
I wonder if the contradictions cause confusion, or cancel each other out. Maybe (Karl) Marx would tell me to relax, and let the dialectic unfold.
Questions or feedback? Email me at: hola@themexpatriate.com. And if you enjoy The Mexpatriate, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.
"Maybe (Karl) Marx would tell me to relax, and let the dialectic unfold." LOL!