Laura Poy Solano
Sent
La Jornada Newspaper
Friday, November 14, 2025, p. 16
Monterrey, NL., More than seven decades since the creation of the first educational research groups in Mexico, we can affirm that “we have a consolidated and recognized academic field, but one that has lacked the capacity for dialogue among its members. We must be able to generate active and respectful listening, even for those who propose arguments that we do not share,” said Dr. Ángel Díaz Barriga, professor-researcher at the Research Institute on University and Education (IISUE) of the UNAM and founding member of the Council Mexican Educational Research Institute (Comie).
In the context of the 18th National Congress of Educational Research, he pointed out that “we have fallen into the errors of academic capitalism, of publishing for the sake of publishing and of allowing evaluation models created for basic science to be applied to us, which represents an enormous challenge for new generations of educational researchers.”
Gathered in the Gumersindo Cantú auditorium of the Faculty of Public Accounting and Administration of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, headquarters of the congress, he emphasized that this scientific field faces the “vanalization of publishing, that is, it is done with little rigor, and many of the research that is disseminated does not have the slightest impact.”
Díaz Barriga stressed that those who began their academic life in the 60s and 70s, “we did so in a university that no longer exists, because it was profoundly modified both by the rules and regulations of scientific research itself that are imposed, and by those that emerged from the so-called academic capitalism, and that unfortunately the General Law of Higher Education did not touch one bit.”
Regarding the moments that have marked a turning point, he highlighted the creation of the National System of Researchers, in the 1980s, which sought to “stop the brain drain and establish a differentiated system for researchers, and it succeeded. Now there are academics who are recognized by the system with a stimulus, and there are other academics who are not in the system and whose salaries are very low.”
“Overcoming mistakes”
In this process, he noted, educational researchers “were assuming a series of norms and guidelines that apply to the community of exact sciences, but that do not correspond to our fields of knowledge, because while in the natural sciences there are absolute truths, in ours there is not: there is always room for interpretation.”
For this reason, he called on the research community to “overcome the errors” of other generations of social scientists in the educational field and learn to defend “our positions, but with respectful dialogue.”
