Mexico City— In the next school year, public secondary school students will no longer have a book dedicated solely to English, as the edition will now be shared with Spanish, indigenous language and arts.
One week before the start of the 2024-2025 school year, the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) through the National Commission for Free Textbooks (Conaliteg) released books for the three grades of secondary school.
Unlike previous years, the copies on this occasion were not purchased from private industry, but were designed by volunteers who did so free of charge at the request of the General Directorate of Educational Materials, headed by Marx Arriaga.
The National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry (CANIEM) considered that it was a discriminatory call, in violation of the law, issued too late, without respect for existing study programs and that it violated the rights of teachers to choose and have access to quality materials.
But its development progressed and the secondary school books have already been published: the Ximhai collection for first grade; the Sk’ asolil for second grade; and the Nanahuatzin for third grade.
In the previous school year 2023-2024, in addition to the Languages book, teachers were able to choose between 11 options of English books from different private publishers, but with free distribution.
For the next cycle, which begins on Monday, August 26, each secondary school grade has been assigned only one copy to learn English and it is mixed with other languages and language expressions.
The first grade secondary school curriculum, Languages, has 319 pages and is divided into sections: Spanish, with 89 pages; Indigenous Language as a Mother Tongue with 59; Indigenous Language as a Second Language with 39; English with 102, and Arts with 44.
The books from private publishers have around 200 pages. That is to say, if we only take the first grade of secondary school as a reference, the content has been reduced by at least half, and they do not contain vocabulary or practices for students to learn to read, write, listen to or understand it.
The lessons are limited to teaching about English culture, its history and topics such as “expressions of violence in English”, “identification and solution of problems in English language texts” and “cultural and artistic manifestations”, in addition to the fact that most of the texts are in Spanish, such as the one related to ‘bullying’, where the only term in English is that one.
#Cut #SEP #English #book
