The Normal of Tiripetío will be declared “primitive, centennial and meritorious”

Ernesto Martinez Elorriaga

Correspondent

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday May 22, 2022, p. 4

Tiripetío, Mich., The Governor of Michoacán, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, announced yesterday that he signed an initiative with a draft decree for the local Congress to declare the Tiripetío Vasco de Quiroga Rural Normal School as primitive, centennial and meritorious.

The head of the Executive explained that the first educational institution founded 100 years ago in Latin America with that character has more than earned its place in the history of normal education and in the defense of the human right to education.

This Saturday, May 20, directors, former students and former teachers carried out a historical-social recount and gave special recognition to teachers who stood out in their work, including teacher Bonfilia Brito Tapia, who taught classes for 46 years and was a student of this teacher training school.

Luis Hernández Navarro, Opinion Coordinator of the dayoffered a master conference in the multipurpose room of the Normal School of Tiripetío, in which he addressed the problems of the normal school.

The educational institution was founded in May 1922 in the municipal seat of Tacámbaro. After the Cristero War it was transferred in 1930 to Erongaricuaro, on the shore of Lake Pátzcuaro. In 1941 it was relocated to Huetamo and in 1944 it moved to La Encarnación, municipality of Zitácuaro.

Finally, in 1949 it was installed in the former Coapa hacienda, Tiripetío possession, 25 kilometers from Morelia. It currently houses 500 low-income students, even from the states of Mexico, Chiapas, Durango, Veracruz and Zacatecas.

Ramírez Bedolla affirmed that the state government no longer persecutes normal school students and that it is time to eradicate the corruption that has prevailed for decades and put the education of the new generations of Michoacán at risk.

We have to assume that the sale of exams is corruption; that the sale of places not only puts the education of girls and boys at risk, but also cancels any possibility of having a real teacher in the classroom.

The president added that he trusts normal schools to be allies of the government, because together with the harassment of the state in past administrations, of the far-right groups that oppose the existence and education of normal schools, a model was implemented that has violated them from withinso the fight against corruption is serious, he warned.