From Publishing Perspectives:
Since Publishing Perspectives first reported in September 2023 on the textbook crisis in Mexico, publishers say the situation has gone from bad to worse, with the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador now taking steps to produce its own English-language-training books.
The Mexican Publishers Association, the Cámara Nacional de la Industria Editorial Mexicana (CANIEM), has issued a formal declaration and complaint, calling out the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) for its effort through the National Commission of Free Textbooks (CONALITEG), to develop educational materials for the teaching of the English language in preschool, primary, and secondary schools.”
In a remarkable next-shoe-to-fall development, the most influential book publishing body in Mexico—the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world—is in litigation with its own federal government over the free-enterprise right to produce not only Spanish-language educational materials but also English-language training (ELT), the latter being vital to the future prosperity of Mexico’s nearshoring national workforce.
Having pushed aside more than 25 years of successful protocols for private commercial textbook creation in Spanish, Mexico’s federal government, the publishers say, now has declined to recognize the publishing community’s Guidelines To Authorize the Use of Didactic Packages for the for the Subject of English as a Foreign Language in Public Schools of Basic Education of the National Education System.
This means, the publishers say, that the government is once more making its own educational materials—as it was discovered to be doing last autumn with Spanish-language texts. Government agencies “are allegedly preparing the English textbooks for the 2024-2025 school year,” the CANIEM says, “without having the corresponding study programs for preschool and elementary school,” information that’s part of the Guidelines.
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When a system of private publishers bidding for the right to produce national textbooks is superseded by a government overtake of textbook creation and production, the result is a clear loss of the freedom to publish for many publishers, who no longer have an open market in which to operate.
And what’s more, the CANIEM writes, “This decision compromises the education and academic training in the English language of millions of Mexican children; violates the rights of teachers to choose and have access to quality teaching materials; and tramples the rights of different publishing houses to participate in their development.
“This puts at risk millions of young people entering the job market to take advantage of Mexico’s integration with the world’s largest and most dynamic international market and such associated phenomena as ‘nearshoring,’ since they do not have basic communication skills.”
Nearshoring, of course, is a business strategy that involves outsourcing various business processes and needs to nearby markets. The United States, obviously, positions the world’s most robust English-language economy in excellent proximity to Mexico. But without the requisite English-language skills, then Mexico’s native Spanish speakers are left out of the nearshoring benefit.
The legal position CANIEM is taking is that its’ actually illegal for the government to take it upon itself to produce English-language training textbooks for preschool and elementary school “without having previously elaborated and presented the study programs to which such books must be adjusted; secondly because the call cannot be made without previously being published in the Official Gazette of the Federation. And finally because in an open and notoriously discriminatory manner, several publishing houses were excluded, all of which are members of the Mexican Association of Publishers.
The Political Context
Many authoritarian governments have included state textbook publishing as an early foray into the erosion of free expression, deploying disinformation to dumb down a population being routed away from critical thinking.
A year ago, in March 2023, Valerie Wirtschafter and Arturo Sarukhan wrote at the Brookings Institution, “As Mexico’s Senate celebrated the passage of a bill designed to curb the power of the National Electoral Institute (INE), the non-partisan and independent agency that oversees elections, the country took another step backward toward its decades-long authoritarian past. … Under president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a pugnacious and charismatic leader who swept to power in 2018, Mexico’s independent institutions are slowly losing their ability to serve as a counterweight to the executive.”
The member-publishers of CANIEM are up against what appears to be another textbook-control grab by the Mexican government for intellectual impact on its population.
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives