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As has happened with the promise of economic stability and with the myth of endless water, which served as the foundation for the organization of huge cities that disdained collecting rainwater, education is also a system that works based on illusions and not always realities.
And this has now been put on the table when in Mexico, for months, the pre-campaign has begun to determine who will be the candidate for President of the Republic by Morena. And in a period as politically charged as this one, even the most academic-social initiatives are read in an eminently political key. Thus, the head of the Government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, has made a proposal for educational change precisely when the four-session Comipems exam season begins to assign young people to high school. In his proposal, he gathers the experience of countries like the United States, which do not use an exam to distribute the demand, but rather, since this level is mandatory and everyone has the same right –as it is the same in Mexico–, all applicants, those who live in a certain geographical area; in Mexico City it would be the equivalent of a mayor’s office.
This would entail a planning exercise for the size of campuses according to the number of applicants that are expected to attend. It is also taken as an immovable assumption that the so-called trade schools or trade schools are taken at the end of high school, the allocation mechanism would not have to include Cetis and Conaleps or be considered as part of upper secondary education.
Basically, Sheinbaum’s proposal proposes to contend with what becomes the real demand of the candidates for the UNAM. As the former rector José Narro of UNAM pointed out at the time, it is not real to consider as demand by the National only the number of applicants who enlist a CCH or high school as first option. If the first five options are taken into consideration, then it turns out that the number of applicants for a place at UNAM is close to 90 percent, which means that thousands choose an IPN campus as their first option, but second, third. , fourth or fifth place continue to opt for UNAM. In other words, UNAM-IPN should plan their offer together, as is the spirit of Sheinbaum’s proposal for the actual distribution of applicants. The proposal should be the subject of extensive discussion and end precisely with a powerful power such as the presidential one, since it would be this one that could – through a specific legal initiative – establish a different organizational design that would respond to the real demand by the UNAM-IPN in high school, and then in the automatic pass to the bachelor’s degree.
I am afraid that any other option would face what has been until now the ethical nightmare of distribution as it exists until now: use the UNAM (and the IPN) as a mere decoy to fill the half-empty schools of Cetis and Conalep or the Colbach campuses . This distribution system, which forces the young men and women to study for three years in a campus that they did not really choose and that does not offer the same perspectives that many others do have –those of the UNAM–, poses the problem of a right deeply differentiated for some within the same allocation system. This differentiation, statistically, has been proven to go against applicants from the popular classes, especially the female gender; that is, those who have less access to this important social heritage that the State offers to girls and young people. Over and over again for more than 20 years, this bias appears in the exams of that commission, coupled with the fact that in 2017 and other years, the Ceneval exam used by Comipems had an error and 11,000 young people were not originally assigned to UNAM ( The Economist8/8/2017).
Ending the Comipems exam would undoubtedly be a civilization advance and a step towards an education that respects the basic principles of equality and human rights. Sheinbaum said: “A young person who leaves high school with a passing level would not have to take an exam to see what type of upper secondary education they are going to… but there should be a high school nearby so that they can access a quality education, without need to pass a contest” (Cruz, Alejandro, the day, 6/21/22). If she says it as a candidate, it is a mere promise that she will not keep; if she says so as head of government, it may be the opportunity to seriously and publicly discuss this paradigm shift and finally leave behind the procedural madness that we have had in the city until today.
* UAM Xochimilco.
