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Mexican education is linked to its turbulent history and its ethnic and class divisions: Indians, Spanish aristocrats, criollos, and peons/mestizos (those of mixed blood). Clearly, the Catholic Church played a significant role in Mexican education during the Colonial era, which extended from first European contact in the early sixteenth century until the Mexican revolution. The Spanish governor of…
Title One, Chapter One, Article Three of the Constitution of Mexico outlines the Mexican educational philosophy: the education imparted by the State shall be designed to develop harmoniously all the faculties of the human being and shall foster in him at the same time a love of country and a consciousness of international solidarity, in independence and justice. Section I of Article Three provides…
The Mexican educational system consists of three levels: primary, secondary, and higher education. Formal basic education encompasses preschool, elementary, and lower secondary. Basic education accounts for approximately 81 percent of the total number of students receiving school services. Federal, state, and local governments provide 93 percent of basic education, while private schools provide ab…
Nearly 7 out of 10 children receive kindergarten education. Although preschool education is not mandatory, it is an important part of basic education in Mexico. Most five-year-olds, 83 percent, attend preschool. Aside from preschool education, many government agencies offer guardería (nursery or day care) services for children younger than three years of age. Here parents and infants receiv…
Secondary education is divided in two levels: lower secondary, or secundaria, and upper secondary education. Since 1993 secundaria has become part of compulsory basic education. Lower secondary is structured into three grades and is offered in several modalities, including general, telesecondary, and technical. This type of education is offered to children between the ages of 12 and 16 years who h…
There are six subsystems of higher education institutions in Mexico: public universities, technological institutes, technological universities, private institutions, teacher training colleges, and other public institutions. When all of them are counted, Mexico has 1,250 institutions of higher education. Traditionally, universities operated under their own organic laws and enjoyed considerable lega…
The main educational agency in Mexico is the Public Education Secretariat, or SEP. This government ministry coordinates basic education within and between all the states. Under the provisions of the 1993 educational reform, the bulk of the administrative and daily operations of schools were transferred from the SEP and other federal agencies to the states. Under this new federalism, the SEP contin…
Throughout the twentieth century, literacy was of great concern to Mexican authorities. At the outset of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, only 15 percent of the population was literate. After the revolution, literacy campaigns made it possible to increase literacy rates to 37 percent in 1940. Census figures for the year 2000 indicated that more than 90 percent of the population was literate. Men an…
In the 2000-2001 school cycle, the SEP estimated that there were a total of 1,468,355 teachers in the country, including those working in private academic institutions. There were 155,777 people employed in preschools, primary schools had 545,717 teachers, and secundaria had 307,763 instructors. Institutions of higher education offering undergraduate degrees, including teacher colleges, had a tota…
Mexico's formal integration into the global economy by way of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, has had impact on the expansion of education at levels. The education reforms of the early 1990s were in keeping with the government's intentions to prepare Mexico to enter NAFTA; therefore, the long overdue expansion of compulsory basic education to include lower secondary e…
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