The importance of intercultural education in Mexico
The reflective criticism that the author makes at the beginning of her article, without a doubt she touches delicate but very true fibers about the true intercultural education in our country, since she is beneficiary especially to a social sector at economically disadvantage. At present there is more value to foreignism than to our own culture. Leaving aside important aspects of our environment. Cultural minorities are those that receive the catastrophic consequences in this regard, since they are relegated and forgotten to give priority to social groups with greater social recognition.
With regard to education, cultural minorities receive an education without offering true quality, the reality in our country is that it is not yet possible to attend and provide effective intercultural education. Barriers of various kinds are found that prevent their full development and implementation from inside and outside school.
The one that in our country is for fact that having an indigenous origin represents inferiority, blocks from the beginning any attempt to establish better conditions for the people belonging to these groups. As a society in our country there is a marked discrimination that largely permeates the acceptance of a true cultural mix and that values above all the harmonic relationships that could be established to learn from each other.
In schools, educational reality presents a series of disadvantages for students, mainly those of indigenous origin, since they are excluded from study programs to living relationships in classrooms. It is not the same to promote with hype and platinum that an intercultural education must be implemented in all schools, but human conditions are provided to achieve it. A clear example of this are bilingual schools established in indigenous communities, multigrade schools where teachers have to do “miracles” to adapt the study programs to the adverse conditions of their context; since there are no materials, textbooks or programmatic advances that consider all the cultural features of the communities. Expected learnings are not adequate or consider the cultural background of populations, even bad teachers belittle the skills or characteristics of students.
On one occasion at the beginning of my teaching practice in Multigrado, I had to listen to a teaching pseudo who mentioned that in order to teach the children of their community the use of traffic light if many would never know him and discriminatory attitudes of this type there are all the days. This is consistent with what the author, that in our country there is no teacher training that perceives the real interest in respect for the ways of thinking and being of the country’s indigenous people.
To date there are no contextualized study programs to the educational realities of indigenous classrooms, the multiculturalism of our country is not considered, being that this is very vast. In addition to this, indigenous education lies from a centralized power that prioritizes urbanity, not providing autonomy. Indeed as the author mentions, in our country there is a double discourse of the educational policies of the Mexican State, which conceals both the real absence of bilingual education, and the lack of protection to the original languages. In our country, a mention is given by the various agreements that have been established with international organizations for loans or financing to invest in educational programs, but this is far from reality in classrooms.
I identify a lot with the author’s ideological thinking, education can often be used for the domination of peoples. Since analyzing various texts and the question was asked what education for what country? It became clear that, in our country, we lack educational policies that attend nationalist aspects, the reform proposals that have been implemented; They respond mainly to foreign interests of international power agencies that financially support educational projects in various countries, promoting their ideology and thought as the unique truth. And that countries like ours abide on the development of their educational policies, to congratulate these organizations and thus obtain various benefits.
In Mexico it is necessary for the State to ensure an indigenous education that responds and considers the characteristics of communities, their voices and ideas to achieve a true intercultural education; since priority is given to the particular interests of an economic sector. And although everything in our world is currently governed by the economic value that is obtained or obtained, indigenism is an important part that must be resumed, especially by the richness of indigenous languages that exist in our country and that day by day lose due to the lack of strategies that promote their use and dissemination.
I really admire the committed teachers who work in indigenous communities, with many barriers to the teaching of students, however, I recognize that their value is what helps education to reach those communities and gave a light of hope for a better quality of life of its inhabitants. We are in a stage where the government that represents us, is leaving aside an important aspect in its tendency to want to please certain educational sectors. Leaving aside the true important one, which is to establish a real educational reform, which responds from now on to the adversities that are lived in the classrooms, starting from the hidden curriculum that occurs, due to the lack of establishment of congruent curriculums with its educational approach. It is not possible that we continue working with outdated educational materials that do not harmonize at all with what was said in oral discourse.
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