Iris Velázquez/ Reform Agency
Monday, February 06, 2023 | 06:52
CDMX.- The recommendation of the Government of the 4T that teachers read Carlos Marx and Vladimir Ilich Lenin to guide their pedagogical activity in the classroom implies the risk of falling into an anti-national education, warned Gilberto Guevara Niebla, former undersecretary of Basic Education of the SEP.
The education specialist corrected the flat to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and asserted that there is indeed something to worry about, since there is an attempt to impose an educational model with authoritarian, ideological, sectarian overtones and far from the Mexican reality.
REFORMA published that the SEP hired the former Venezuelan Chavista official Sady Arturo Loaiza Escalona as deputy director of Educational Materials of the SEP, who now promotes, together with his boss, Marx Arriaga, that teachers read books such as “El Capital”, by Marx, and “What to do?”, by Lenin.
“SEP theorists are inspired by anti-modern, non-democratic philosophies and visions; there is no possible contact between modern education and the education proposed by the SEP, they are totally antagonistic, contradictory to each other.
Of course, this eternal antagonism between the elites and the people is a farce, a myth, a story,” Guevara Niebla, who served as undersecretary at the beginning of this six-year term, said in an interview.
“It is very serious, in reality what they are proposing. It is trampling the values of Mexico as a nation, the vision of reality, that is to say: the education that they propose is anti-national, anti-constitutional. Education is no longer going to be national. What does it mean this? The school is not going to be the place where we are going to learn about the real problems, the national problems,” he added.
By itself, Guevara indicated, the 4T intends to impose an ideology similar to the opinions of President López Obrador, which, he warned, will polarize society between the people and the neoliberals.
This, he considered, is sectarian, radical and goes against what has been built over several years.
“The SEP continues to promote the reform of study plans; a totally aberrational and sectarian reform that is obviously headed by Mr. Marx Arriaga. The conception they have of education is also a sectarian, dual conception, that is, there is education for the people and there is neoliberal education,” he said.
“They say ‘the current education is neoliberal’, so we need to create a new education that is popular, anti-neoliberal. In reality, this is reproducing the antagonistic and bipolar logic of AMLO’s discourse. The education that is here is liberal and based on that education We can build a fair, democratic, united, dialoguing, fraternal world. It is false that we are definitively separated as the President used to say”.
In this sense, the former official criticized that the SEP has placed Loaiza Escalona in charge of the sub-directorate of Educational Materials and thus give him the mission of preparing textbooks.
“It is surprising that a foreigner has a very prominent position. We would have to demand from the SEP that a foreigner have a very prominent position. We would have to demand from the SEP that they explain their presence to us and that they explain to us how that presence is justified. For education national, to follow the directives of the third article of the Constitution in this matter, because (the Chavista) needs to know the Mexican educational fund,” he considered.
Guevara Niebla considered that there must be information and consultation with the public, who, he maintained, must demand that a step as important as the design of content for Mexican students does not imply an educational setback.
