Growing up in the southern mexican town of putla Villa de Guerrero, Lili Gracida Jiménez watched with dismay as teachers lined up students by order of intelligence, calling the underperformers names.
“My teachers were cruel,” recalls Gracida Jiménez, who went on to graduate from Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca and now teaches Spanish at a private language school in the capital city of Oaxaca, which has the same name as the state. “If you weren’t thought to be intelligent, they called you a burro (donkey).”
Two decades after the cruelty Gracida Jiménez experienced, teaching remains a concern in the southern state, one of the poorest in the country. In 2006, Oaxaca drew worldwide attention for a seven-month popular uprising in which the teachers’ union played a key role. Protesters clashed with police which led to multiple deaths and widespread international condemnation, by academics in particular, for alleged human rights abuses by security forces.
According to a World Bank report published in February, the poor quality of the state’s schools is one of the factors hindering Oaxaca’s higher education institutions. The organisation’s study, Educación Superior y Desarrollo en Oaxaca (Higher Education and Development in Oaxaca), is part of a larger effort to help Oaxaca, which has a population of 3.8 million, battle its poverty, health and development problems, which are among Mexico’s worst. Higher education is among the keys to solving those challenges, the report notes.
The state finds itself in a strange situation, says Miguel Székely, director of the Institute for Innovation in Education based in Monterrey, Mexico and author of the World Bank report. Of the minuscule number of Oaxacans who acquire university degrees, one out of five has been trained to teach in primary school, Székely found, and many of those teachers have not been trained well.
Moreover, he argues, in a state where the primary school-age population is declining, there is a dearth of university graduates in disciplines that would help the economy. “If this (the number of graduates going into teaching) was construction, electricity or software, it would make more sense,” Székely says. “There’s this element of imbalance in Oaxaca.”
According to Székely, Oaxaca faces some unique obstacles, chief among them the state’s teachers’ union, which frequently shuts down the capital city’s roads with demonstrations and controls most aspects of teaching. He contends that the state government — led by Gabino Cue Monteagudo of the social democratic Citizen’s Movement, whose 2010 election victory ended the 80-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party — must wrest control from the union to direct more teachers into secondary schools and more tertiary students into fields other than teacher training.
The more teachers the state trains, the more power the union gains and lower the chance of the state changing the system, he contends. “The phenomenon of the teachers’ union in Oaxaca has been very powerful, mainly because they can paralyse the state. It’s a very peculiar thing that’s going on in Oaxaca,’’ says Székely.