EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper
Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire
dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma.
Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for
discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually
gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or
tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer
a more dignified life.
Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn
much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican
population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there
are more illiterate people in
Mexico
now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the
ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice
of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated
country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a
Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it
possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a
week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
She ought to be behind bars, but education reform with a focus on
teachers instead of students is nothing new. For many years now, the
job of the education secretary has been not to educate Mexicans but to
deal with the teachers and their labor issues. Nobody in Mexico
organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many
teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education
themselves.
During a strike in 2008 in Oaxaca, I remember walking through the
temporary campground in search of a teacher reading a book. Among tens
of thousands, I found not one. I did find people listening to
disco-decibel music, watching television, playing cards or dominoes,
vegetating. I saw some gossip magazines, too.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response when I spoke at a
recent event for promoting reading for an audience of 300 or so 14- and
15-year-olds. “Who likes to read?” I asked. Only one hand went up in
the auditorium. I picked out five of the ignorant majority and asked
them to tell me why they didn’t like reading. The result was
predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to
articulate a sentence, express an idea.
Frustrated, I told the audience to just leave the auditorium and go
look for a book to read. One of their teachers walked up to me, very
concerned. “We still have 40 minutes left,” he said. He asked the kids
to sit down again, and began to tell them a fable about a plant that
couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a flower or a head of cabbage.
“Sir,” I whispered, “that story is for kindergartners.”
In 2002, President Vicente Fox began a national reading plan; he chose
as a spokesman Jorge Campos, a popular soccer player, ordered millions
of books printed and built an immense library. Unfortunately, teachers
were not properly trained and children were not given time for reading
in school. The plan focused on the book instead of the reader. I have
seen warehouses filled with hundreds of thousands of forgotten books,
intended for schools and libraries, simply waiting for the dust and
humidity to render them garbage.
A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home
state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not
understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,”
he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the
difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between
deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered
what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we
needed to teach them to read the newspaper.
When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction
from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology
textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the
same time.” In our schools, children are being taught what is easy to
teach rather than what they need to learn. It is for this reason that
in Mexico — and many other countries — the humanities have been pushed
aside.
We have turned schools into factories that churn out employees. With no
intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the
next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. In
this light it is natural that in secondary school we are training
chauffeurs, waiters and dishwashers.
This is not just about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5 percent of its
gross domestic product
on education — about the same percentage as the United States. And it’s
not about pedagogical theories and new techniques that look for
shortcuts. The educational machine does not need fine-tuning; it needs
a complete change of direction. It needs to make students read, read
and read.
But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be
truly educated. We know that books give people ambitions, expectations,
a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the
Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and
our frightened government would be asking itself where these people got
more than a dishwasher’s training.
David Toscana is the author of the novel “The Last Reader.” This essay was translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.
