ABSTRACT
The legacy of neo-liberalism in Mexican education thus far can be best understood as a shift in the terrain from whence educational issues are discussed, disputed, and resolved or transformed. Unfortunately, this shift has occurred in the direction anticipated by the very nature of neoliberalism as a phase in capitalist development: Everything becomes subordinated to the macroeconomy at the same time as the economic (political) decisions become abstracted out of sight of mortal men and women. For Mexican education, this has meant that educational problems are being defined, negotiated, and interpreted in novel ways. Twenty years ago debates about education appeared as explicitly political issues: modernization (as administrative rationalization for improved efficiency of state institutions) confronted democratization (as extension of labor and union rights for teachers as state workers) while social consensus and state legitimacy presupposed the expansion of public education as a social good. Today, a couple of years into the twenty-first century, issues seem no longer political in the sense of continually contesting the existing power arrangements; problems are couched in either/or options that assume the form of local-level, apolitical (mostly expertise) interpretations: successful or unsuccessful schools; effective or ineffective teachers; good or bad education; improved retention rates; or declining demand for public schools. If the educational system has been perceived to be excessively politicized by virtue of conflicts involving major, national-level political actors, now education has seemingly come unto itself and embraced its “true” nature as pedagogy, as the means for producing school-based learning. During the seventies and eighties, educational reform was depicted by researchers as a scramble for control of state educational institutions and bureaucracy between two major groups: the technocratic profesionistas articulated to the Mexican state’s initial administrative reforms and the patrimonial sindicalistas linked to the dominant party’s way of playing politics (state power was equivalent to the PRI-government, Partido Revolucionario Institucional.)
Education was the arena for asserting social and political positions of power; many researchers lamented the subordination of educational decision making to politics.
