Despite talk of a border wall, the Mexican government has no intention allowing the country to retreat into a shell and is eager to move ahead with plans to ensure that all of its children are taught English from an early age.
Continuing the educational reforms passed at the beginning of his administration, President Enrique Peña Nieto this week unveiled a new set of strategies designed to maintain the modernization of the country’s public educational system.
The Nuevo Modelo Educativo will see English taught as an obligatory subject at all educational levels, including pre-school, as of the 2018-2019 school cycle.
According to Education Secretary Aurelio Nuño Mayer, the new model is an “authentic revolution” that puts in place a “pedagogic philosophy, and reorganization of the educational system and public policy.”
The idea is to move away from traditional rote memorization to new paradigms of learning to better prepare Mexico’s children for the future. These include “the capacity for reading comprehension, written and verbal expression, plurilingualism, understanding of the natural and social world, analytic reasoning and criticism,” Nuño Mayer said at the launch of the plan Monday.
Schools will be given greater autonomy and be allowed to choose 20 percent of their curriculum according to their regional necessities and circumstances. Children, together with their parents, will be able to have 2.5 hours a week of tuition in a subject of their own choosing, such as technology, robotics, finance, crafts, horticulture, etcetera.
Within three to four years, every school in the country must have installed a “media room” guaranteeing students access to the internet and digital information.
To enable English to be taught effectively at all levels, Nuño Mayer recognized the need for teachers graduating from teacher training colleges to a have a much higher level of written and spoken English.
Starting to learn English at a very young age will enable public school students to finish their high school studies with a reasonable level of fluency in the language, he said.
Previous attempts by federal governments to prioritize English in schools have failed because they lacked a well-structured, coherent, long-term model, the education secretary said.
Implementing this new strategy so hurriedly, however, is certain to have its critics who will argue that it will take many, many years to train enough qualified teachers in order for Mexico’s public school students to obtain the same language abilities of, say, many European nations.