Monday, August 30 is a big day some 37 million Mexican students, who return to school after being deprived of school for a year and a half because of the Covid-19 health crisis. The Mexican authorities have decided: despite the third wave of Covid which is spreading across the country, the students absolutely need to return to face-to-face lessons.
Mexico is one of the few countries in the world to have kept its schools closed without interruption since the start of the pandemic: Mexican teachers were particularly reluctant to resume classes, because they feared contagion. Now, the latter have been vaccinated for several months already and today a majority of Mexicans consider that the closure of schools has lasted too long.
A few days ago President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared: “Whether it’s raining, shining, or thunder is unleashed, the schools will reopen.” That said, the authorities have opted for a gradual and voluntary return to school: parents worried about the risks will be able to not send their children to school on Monday. For Mexican students, these fifteen months without face-to-face lessons contrast with the absence of restrictive measures for all other activities.
Children could go to the cinema, to a shopping center, to a restaurant, to an amusement park… But not to school!
Astrid Hollander, Education Officer of the United Nations Children’s Fund in Mexicoto franceinfo
For distance education, the authorities have set up courses by television to reach the majority of homes. But due to technical problems or the children’s difficulty concentrating in front of the television, this system did not have the desired results.
As in other countries, the closure of schools in Mexico has further affected students from the poorest backgrounds. Inequalities are obvious when it comes to distance education, especially because technological means vary enormously from one family to another. “Not all students have access to the Internet at home and even if they do, there are not necessarily all the necessary devices available for the children of the same household, continues Astrid Hollander. Sometimes there is only one cell phone to share for the whole family. “
And then the economic difficulties linked to the pandemic also affected children’s education. Many began to work to support their families, replacing school with work. And this is reflected in the school dropout figures: last year more than 2.5 million students under the age of 18 dropped out of school and if you take higher education into account, five million Mexican students have dropped out of the education system.