Education and neoliberalism in Yucatan, Mexico
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2455
Under neoliberalism, at least in Mexico, education has been recast as a service that is to be sold for money, and not as a right of all Mexicans. The economy itself is now seen as a services economy, where everything is expected to make money. Here we reflect on some of the implications of current education reforms on our work at the Autonomous University of Yucatan.
application/pdf
2239-625X
2455
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en
Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
Anuac
Education and neoliberalism in Yucatan, Mexico
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
5
Forum: Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016-08-13
2016-08-06
2016-08-13
59-62
1
Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2455
59
Autonomous University of Yucatán, Mexico
2239-625X
1
en
62
Education and neoliberalism in Yucatan, Mexico
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/2455/2087
5
                                                       2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90




                                                                                                      FORUM




Student-led demonstration, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, February 4, 2015. Overpass Light Brigade, Joe Brusky
photographer. Source: overpasslightbrigade.org/love-light-for-uw-fight-the-cuts/.



Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Cris SHORE & Susan WRIGHT, Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, Sarah GREEN, Gabriela VARGAS-CETINA
& Steffan Igor AYORA-DIAZ, Tracey HEATHERINGTON, Dimitris DALAKOGLOU, Noelle MOLÉ
LISTON, Susana NAROTZKY, Jaro STACUL, Meredith WELCH-DEVINE, Jon P. MITCHELL.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)
Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2437
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                                   59




Education and neoliberalism in Yucatan, Mexico
Gabriela VARGAS-CETINA
Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico
Steffan Igor AYORA-DIAZ
Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico


ABSTRACT: Under neoliberalism, at least in Mexico, education has been recast as a service that is to
be sold for money, and not as a right of all Mexicans. The economy itself is now seen as a services
economy, where everything is expected to make money. Here we reflect on some of the implica-
tions of current education reforms on our work at the Autonomous University of Yucatan.



   On June 19 of 2016 in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, armed soldiers fired their wea-
pons against a group of teachers who were protesting against the “education reform”
ordered by Mexico’s national government. According to CNN and other international
agencies, eight persons died, while 53 civilians and 55 policemen were injured 1. In the
aftermath, officials from Mexico’s National Security Commission said that the police
had not fired because they were not carrying guns, and all the videos and photos publi-
shed by the international press were doctored. Only after the national and international
press distributed widely their videos of the shootings did the authorities finally accep-
ted that the Mexican police had fired and caused fatalities2.
   The teachers were striking against the so-called “education reform”, which is in fact
an administrative reform of the National System of Education. Until 2011, elementary
school teachers attended Escuelas Normales (School for Teachers) for four years after
High School in order to become eligible to compete for jobs in the National System of
Education schools. These are public elementary schools, and teachers are usually free
to develop their own take on the national curriculum, as long as they also teach the ba-
sic contents required by the Secretary of Education. Escuelas Normales are known for
being politically combative, since the teachers at elementary schools generally work
closely with parents and families, and are aware of local problems and needs. Also, in
Indigenous areas, the teachers use the local language to teach children until grade four,
switching their students’ language requirement to Spanish in grades five and six.
   Upon becoming President of Mexico, in December of 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto
announced an Education Reform that, according to his government, would make Mexi-
can education internationally competitive, by increasing the international standing of

1. edition.cnn.com/2016/06/20/americas/oaxaca-mexico-clashes/index.html (accessed on 15 July 2016).
2. www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36572423 (accessed on 15 July 2016).

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60                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


Mexico on international indexes such as the Programme for International Student As-
sessment (PISA). This was to be done through a major overhaul of the national educa-
tion system. In practice, judging from what the teachers have publically declared during
the protests, and from what we know from teachers in Yucatan, this meant that all tea-
chers would take an exam, and if they failed it, they would lose their jobs. The require -
ment of graduating from an Escuela Normal (Teaching School) was removed; accor-
ding to the new regulations anyone can take the exam and, if they pass it, become a
teacher at an elementary school of the National System of Education. The main target
seems to be the teachers’ national trade union, one of the strongest in the country be-
cause it has members in all Mexican states. Judging from the news, and also from the
comments of teachers on posts to news about the protests, many teachers in Mexico
seem to have signed these documents and then taken the exam, even if they saw this as
signing away their job security and their workers’ rights and giving up on their union. In
states like Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, three of the poorest states of Mexico, tea-
chers have been publicly protesting against this reform, not only because it takes away
their job security but also because the authorities may use the exam to censure politi-
cally-engaged teachers by firing them immediately. In the aftermath of the killings of
teachers and bystanders in Oaxaca, protests are now taking place in all of Mexico.
    Yucatan is relatively far away from Oaxaca (1160 Km) and it takes 18 hours and 39
minutes to travel between Merida and the City of Oaxaca by bus. At the Autonomous
University of Yucatan (UADY) each year we get only a few students who graduated
from Oaxacan high schools, but we do share many of the problems now affecting Oaxa-
can elementary school teachers and Oaxacan universities, because of the larger context
of neoliberal economics, Mexican-style. UADY is known for its high quality programs.
Between 2000 and 2011 it used to be among the five top public universities of the Me-
xican Republic. At this point, however, our University is in the process of becoming an
institution less attuned to international research and more attuned to the requirements
of a general workforce in a service economy. The neoliberal doctrine of education as a
service to potential industry and service workers has affected UADY in at least the fol-
lowing ways:
    1. The drive toward professors’ demonstrable productivity. Since the 1990s, profes-
sors in all public and many private universities across Mexico have been asked to docu-
ment every single activity they perform. Paper certificates are issued for each single ac-
tivity. Organizing a seminar, putting together a syllabus, giving a paper, and even ha-
ving been an employee of the University all need to be certified by an actual document,
which at UADY used to be submitted to a committee at the end of each year as a pile
of papers, and since 2014 have to be scanned an uploaded to a platform into the appro-
priate slots, according to UADY’s program of Professor productivity. While in the past
professors’ productivity used to be tied mainly to money incentives, now we are increa-
singly moving toward a punitive regime, where everyone has to report to an ever-
increasing number of accounting agencies and their respective platforms, lest we lose


2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                         61


employment-related rights. We have been advised that in a not-so-far-away future tenu-
re will disappear, because it is too costly, and most teaching will be compensated ac-
cording to professors’ productivity indexes.
    2. The exponential growth of administrative positions, relative to professors. In 2015
our incoming Rector (the highest authority in Mexican universities) calculated that we
were reaching a proportion of 3 administration positions per each tenured academic.
He saw this as a positive development.
    3. The transformation of our programs from research-driven speciality programs
(anthropology, archaeology, history, Latin American literature, social communications
and tourism, which are all part of the Anthropological Sciences Faculty) into general
education programs that will help our graduates find a job not necessarily related to a
university education. Until 2010, our graduates were expected to have mastered at least
some research methods and techniques that would help them to get a job as research
assistants, or in places where first-hand knowledge of local problems was needed, or
would make it possible for them to pursue postgraduate degrees. For several years now,
however, students who passed the university’s entry exam but did not make it into the
sciences, engineering, medical or accounting careers, which are the ones most in de-
mand, are transferred to those programs that did not fill up their maximum quota of
entry students. At this point, in the social sciences and humanities we have to teach
many students who are not interested in what we are teaching nor do they want to finish
an anthropology degree; the only reason they come to our classes is to have the right to
take the entry exam again each year and try to enter the other Faculties. We are baby-
sitting an increasing number of disgruntled and disinterested students. In the meantime,
the social sciences and the humanities are regularly derided as bad career options and
economic cul-de-sacs by the parents of our students and by the general public.
    4. We are now considered a public service university and not a research university.
International agencies, including the World Bank, advised the Mexican government
that public universities, especially outside central Mexico, should not dedicate their re-
sources to research but rather to general education. While in the recent past in Yucatan
the public university was only the top among a possible number of institutions students
could attend, according to their scores on the national post-high school exam, our uni-
versity is in the process of becoming a general studies institution. As we are asked to
increase the number of our students and decrease the complexity of our courses, at
UADY’s Faculty of Anthropological Sciences we are finding it harder to compete with
other study options for the incoming student generations. In the meantime, UADY does
not have the installations nor the personnel to admit more hundreds of students. It is a
no-win situation for the professors: We have to make our courses easier to follow and
become a general studies option, we still do not fill the student entry quotas expected
by authorities, and we are still expected to carry out a regular research and teaching
load because of the increased requirements in “professor productivity”.



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   5. It is increasingly difficult to teach the incoming students because they are so poor-
ly prepared. This relates to the teachers’ protests in Oaxaca and elsewhere, as education
has been the political target of successive Mexican governments: world history, Greek
and Latin etymology, general philosophy and other subjects important for an education
in the social sciences have been either reduced or completely removed from the pre-
university curriculum. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we could expect stu-
dents to have some notions of the social sciences and to be able to understand some
concepts from grammar or linguistics, so that they could be taught how to write essays
in our disciplines. Today, their reading and writing skills are very poor. We are in the
process of revising the requirements of our courses, because they seem unable to cope
with the previous amount of written papers.
   We feel that the quality of the education we can offer is suffering, and have no way
of making things improve. Neoliberalism, unfortunately, has resulted in similar devel-
opments in many countries where education is suffering under the new creed of whole-
sale commodification. It does not need to be so: Estonia is one example of a nation
committed to making education its main asset in the world’s capitalist economy. There
could be other ways and other models for economic advancement in the current world
market. Mexico, however, has chosen the path of turning education into a market-driv-
en commodity.




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