Mexican Students Receive Textbooks “Riddled” With Errors
As children and teachers in Mexico began the new school year on August 19th, they discovered that their government-provided textbooks contained over a hundred errors. 235 million primary school textbooks have been found to contain misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and at least one instance of incorrect geographical data: a city located in the wrong state.
The textbook scandal is being called an embarrassment for the Mexican government, amidst recent teacher protests and other criticisms of the Mexican school system.
Education Secretary Emilio Chuayffet called the mistake-laden textbooks “unforgivable,” but says the errors were discovered this summer only after the books had begun to be printed. Chuayffet says he made the choice to continue printing them in order to ensure students would have textbooks for the start of their classes.
Education officials promised to give teachers a list of the 117 errors that have been found so far, so that they can correct them manually. Still, many teachers and parents are unhappy.
Mexico’s National Commission of Free Textbooks, responsible for the error-filled books, told the newspaper Milenio that freelance editors, who are paid less that $250 a month, are to blame for the mistakes.
Mexico’s education system has dealt with several crises in recent years. Reports of overburdened teachers, a stale curriculum, and a lack of funds have been publicized. Though the country spends more of its budget on education than any other OECD nation, standardized test scores remain the lowest out of all 34 OECD states, and only 47% of Mexican children graduate high school.
Creative Commons Love: ash-s on Flickr.com
Written by Carla Drumhiller Smith
