This paper seeks to analyze the New Mexican School (NMS) as a part of the broader political project of the Fourth Transformation in Mexico, with particular attention to its humanistic orientation and its potential for a decolonial reading. The study aims to demonstrate how a decolonial philosophy can both enrich the intentionality of educational change and expose the limitations of state-led reforms in producing emancipatory outcomes.
The research is based on a theoretical and philosophical analysis of the NMS. Drawing on the framework of decolonial thought and the writings of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the study evaluates official documents and discourses of the NMS, considering them in light of broader political and cultural processes in Mexico. The approach is interpretive rather than empirical, prioritizing conceptual clarity and critical reflection.
The analysis suggests that while the NMS incorporates elements of Mexican humanism and acknowledges cultural diversity, it also faces significant challenges in transcending national policy frameworks. A decolonial perspective reveals both the possibilities of humanistic formation and the structural limits that hinder deeper transformations.
This work does not cover all of the transformations of the NMS.
The findings encourage policymakers and educators to reflect on how educational reforms can be aligned with decolonial philosophies to move beyond formal policy change toward transformative practices.
By highlighting the tension between national projects and decolonial practices, the paper contributes to debates on how education can better serve pluri-ethnic communities and strengthen democratic life.
This study's originality lies in linking the NMS philosophy to decolonial thought, positioning it within broader debates about humanism, reform and the limits of educational transformation.
Toward the New Mexican School: contrast of a political and educational reform
The veil conceals beauty (Fanon, 1959, p. 26).
Discussing education in Mexico is a challenge because it is the history of a conflict that condenses the country's social and political history. In other words, the educational system is a product of conflict, as expressed in the works of Ernesto Meneses (1983), Tendencias Educativas Oficiales en México, grouped in specific periods: 1821–1911; 1911–1934; 1934–1964. The trends continually express these adjustments and modifications. Educational changes in Mexico have not stopped to this day, and the New Mexican School (NMS) is inscribed as one of these changes. However, it cannot be fully assessed without a contrast. The reform implemented in 2013 allows us to understand the ruptures that occur from an educational change centered on the labor market to one centered on education (Bojórquez-Luque, 2024).
Latapí Sarre (2004) explained that not all changes in this area could be called educational policies and established at least four criteria to clarify this sense: (1) Presence of the State, (2) legislation beyond the president, (3) democratic acceptance and (4) accountability (p. 3). Following this, it is possible to consider the NMS as an educational policy with a humanistic sense, since the four criteria are met to a greater or lesser extent. This is an interesting contrast with formulations that had not been seen in the history of education in Mexico since 1988 (Latapí Sarre, 2004). Below, I will briefly present the conditions of this educational policy and then address its humanistic sense, with the intention of clarifying how the humanistic sense guides this policy.
When considering the nature of this educational policy, it is possible to understand the philosophical components at various levels presented in it, from content to orientations. The main thing is to clarify the purpose or goal of education; in the NMS it is proposed to guarantee the right to education, through four conditions (Secretaría de Educación Pública SEP, 2019): Availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability of educational services. In its founding documents, the following is expressed:
Affordability implies the guarantee of the social right to free and compulsory education, as well as the cultural right to respect for diversity (...) Accessibility obliges the State to facilitate free and inclusive compulsory education for all (...) Acceptability considers establishing criteria for safety, quality, and warmth of education, as well as the professional qualities of teachers. Adaptability refers to the capacity to adapt education to the sociocultural context of students in each school (Secretaría de Educación Pública SEP, 2019, p. 4).
The humanistic orientation is a guiding axis of this project, a fundamental principle because by establishing the recognition of social rights for peoples and the recognition of obligations of the State, a possibility is configured to take a slight distance from exclusive market formulas for educational processes. Mignolo (2006) warned of possibilities and risks: “things are not so black and white (...) they are no less complicated in the sphere of civil society and political society (...) today the imperiality of knowledge and the coloniality of knowledge traverse the spheres of states, civil society, and political society” (pp. 14–15). There is a complex configuration in these three areas of power, knowledge and being. An educational policy of this nature is not exempt from having colonial tensions.
In this reform, when Mexican humanism is spoken of, at least two lax and compatible senses can be understood: As a socio-historical philosophical category and as an axiological norm. Herein lies a foundation of this political project of education. Following Velasco (2009), it is understood that not all humanistic knowledge implies a humanist foundation; hence, there is an interest in the axiological norm that focuses its attention on the transformation of the human being and their social environment, recovering dignity and freedom (p. 3). This epistemic model does not dispose its capacities exclusively to the useful, in function of an abstract universal, but rather reconfigures the notion of education, overflowing it from the mere informative act.
Decolonial reflection has a presence from the moment it seeks to blur Renaissance thought as exclusivity and “intra-European” definition (Dussel, 1994, p. 35). It is not arbitrary to recover the notion of Mexican humanism. Thus, in principle, the humanistic orientation of this educational reform requires an adequate philosophical categorization. This is an important challenge at the academic level since there is a risk of falling into a vacuum of nationalism that, under the guise of decoloniality, incurs colonial practices; this humanist character inscribed in its principles will be explored further below. Following the argumentation, a political reform of this type cannot be understood in isolation; there is a historicity that was expressed in the labor and educational organization in previous periods that demanded a rupture with market models in educational processes.
Martínez Riso (2023) has mentioned that in 2019 there is indeed a rupture, in contrast to previous versions, but that it cannot be established as something completely encouraging due to its characteristic of being reactive to the 2013 reform, giving a quality of urgency to the project; nevertheless, he considers that to evaluate the results with more elements, he affirms that “a broader opinion should wait” (p. 138). Frequently, criticisms have focused on issues of little relevance at the educational level (the ways of organizing curricular content, the change of name, etc.); thus:
…that the so-called educational reform of Peña Nieto, in the words of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was discarded, with a new rupture presented as deeper and rapidly implemented. (…) In the second half of the administration, an unfinished version of another reform was disseminated, which was announced to begin implementation in the 2022–2023 academic year but was postponed to 2023–2024. (…) Few have substantively questioned the serious flaws in the document, which disregards advances in cognitive sciences, pedagogy, and specialized didactics and is based on questionable (and pedagogically inadequate) ideas from the epistemology of the South, along with an ideological rejection of neoliberalism (Martínez Riso, 2023, p. 171).
It is worthwhile to ask ourselves, why can the NMS be considered a profound but at the same time rapid rupture? This new way of presenting the educational system has an impact at the magisterial level that counteracts the labor effects of what was established in 2013, justified under teacher evaluation processes. There was participation from various relevant sectors in the elaboration of the reform, and this is another contrast with previous visions whose main changes obeyed recommendations from private organizations. The Founding Decree of an NMS by the Government of Mexico (2019) was the result of dialogs and promises with the magisterial sector according to Bojórquez-Luque (2024, p. 150), but it does not have the desired impact as a counter-reform, since there would be elements of continuity between one and the other. In that sense, the expression of being a rapid rupture is appropriate.
However, the characteristic of depth lies in recovering the institutional planning of the educational process, recognizing the diversity of contexts and centralizing the basic minimum of content, which has been called the Common Curricular Framework for Basic and Upper Secondary Education (SEMS, 2024, 2012). This implies going directly against the educational criteria established previously, which Aboites (2012/2021) anticipates with precision as a neoliberal formula focused on a labor and mercantile process of the educational field. Criteria linked to the supply and demand of a field and not to the social need that has multiple expressions in different areas of Mexico.
Recognizing the diversity of contexts is a complex issue that this project brings to the table, and to make it possible, I believe it is necessary to work on it from a decolonial practice, that is, to know or recognize the strangeness of problems, possibilities and visions in the diversity of a country, although without falling into what Pereda (2012) has called “branch-office fervor” or “nationalist enthusiasm” (p. 40) as inappropriate forms of epistemic or political communities that are directed towards normalizing ends. In this same perspective, a continuity of experiences can be identified, which, as has been said, has a humanistic foundation as its axis in the recovery process for teaching. Pereda (2012) urges us to recognize that there are homogeneous continuities, but that there are also heterogeneous continuities (p. 50). National and popular experiences are heterogeneous continuities. Figures like Catherine Walsh (2013) have warned of a certain distrust of reformist processes of this type, mentioning:
Political moments, without a doubt, are increasingly entangled and complex (...) the terms used by self-denominated “progressive” South American governments point to movements and changes from above that, although they claim to distance themselves from neoliberalism, lead towards a nationalism where neo-extractivism and the criminalization of protest are the most evident axes of the change in progression. (Walsh, 2013, p. 24)
In that sense, clarifying the humanistic foundation of this educational vision does not necessarily lead us to an instrumentalist view of pedagogies or forms of teaching, but it is important to understand the historicity in which changes of this nature are inscribed and, in parallel, to pay attention to the activities that could deepen the changes. It is important to point out that decolonization is not a metaphor; it seems relevant to situate it as an active practice inscribed in a historical context, as defended in the argumentation of Tuck and Yang (2012), without falling into innocence or deepening the critique on the edge of the possible, as carried out by Garba and Sorentino (2020), a clear indication that there is no unified vision in emancipatory and decolonial proposals.
As has been mentioned, the ends pursued by education and contributing to understanding the national in non-colonial ways lead us to philosophical reflection. This educational project has an important contrast in its justification; frequently, the Eurocentric educational ideal has thought of the Greek Paideia (Jaeger, 2001) as a reference of cultural aspiration, of citizen formation with the capacity for ethical reflection inscribed in the “polis.” An enlightened ideal that hardly assumes the practical complexities of pluri-ethnicity. The sense of an educational reform in Mexico, it seems to me, is far from an innocent vision; it can be understood as an uncomfortable amendment because it is not a matter of a naive philosophical understanding but rather a historical recovery that seeks to reinterpret our experience of being in the world in continuity with an oppressive present past.
It is essential to mention that, in the NMS reform, there are convergences on the educational diagnosis presented in previous governances, such as the change in evaluation processes, teacher professionalization, the urgency of contextualizing practices and elements linked to socio-formative processes. In other words, when educating, it is expected that an agent will be able to inscribe themselves in a context, whether labor, cultural or social. A genuine educational proposal, as Tobón, Guzmán & Tobón refers to it, allows the teacher to “transform their pedagogical practices and students to have greater sensitivity and commitment to the challenges of their community, such as poverty and violence, through collaboration” (2018, p. 24). It is possible to affirm that the rupture does have a fundamental ideological character in the sense that this proposal does not overestimate previous evaluation systems, whose criteria are represented as alien to local realities, based on standardized tests limited to the labor dimension or cognitive abilities without significant adaptations to the context. Even less so to entities of the private sector that saw in this process an area of profit.
Walsh (2017) has pointed out that “the actional practices, the praxistic-political bets and the methodological and organizational processes that we use and invent (...) to fight against the war-death project” (p. 43) are scaffolding for moving outside market logic. Prudently, invention takes place, and it is an element that in the NMS will have to be present due to the need for a diversification of problems. The political dimension of an educational change is a topic that can be pointed out with triviality; it is not a minor issue when seeking to reduce gaps and reorient education primarily as a right and a possibility of experiencing ourselves from other dimensions.
On the other hand, it is interesting how philosophical expressions such as decoloniality or epistemologies of the south are worked on, alluding to them as a series of educational or pedagogical proposals; the label is a generic aspect that cannot be considered as a critique of the content. Epistemologies of the south, as research programs, have diversity and approaches with greater or lesser consistency. It would be difficult to express that the proposals of Mignolo (2011), Quijano (2000) or Dussel (1996) are homologated. Although these proposals have expressions in educational practices, they are not, by themselves, pedagogical or didactic proposals or at least not in their conventional sense of the educational field. It is true that they can be inferred from them and innovate fields, but these types of postulates are not unidirectional. If this is the case, then it would be worthwhile to think about how they are integrated, what is present in the reform, what can be reconciled and what cannot. In the following section, an attempt is made to briefly outline these points.
Deriving policy from absence: a possible reading
It is not only a matter of covering oneself with the veil. Fanon (1959, p. 43)
From the previous section, I want to point out that from the absence of one model, the possibilities of another have been allowed to be derived. This sets the pattern of continuities and ruptures. There was no adequate link with educational and community environments; the challenge for the NMS is to favor the link in broader fields, hence its Classroom, School and Community Program (CSCP) (SEMS, 2024) as a strategy to articulate the actors involved. At the teaching level, one can speak of the Common Curricular Framework (CCF) (SEMS, 2024), which generates the organization of integrated and indispensable content. There is a point of importance in the NMS that can make these purposes possible: the teaching activity or practice that could be worked on as an “educational praxis” (Martínez Ávila, 2023). Here, teachers are positioned as key figures in this change, without losing sight of the institution or the social region where they are inscribed.
The individual figure of the teacher can be reinterpreted, which requires an intra-institutional dialog of teaching communities, an important problem when there are generations and very marked habits of a strong individualizing and productivist tendency. However, community expressions are historical formations of deep significance; Lander (2000) explained it as follows:
…we find a rebellious traditional culture. The conservative culture of the commoners, as often as not, resists, in the name of custom (...) Innovation is more evident at the top of society than below, but since this innovation is not a neutral and norm-free technological/sociological process (...) but the innovation of the capitalist process, it is often experienced by the commoners in the form of exploitation, or appropriation of their traditional use rights, or the violent disruption of valued models of work and leisure... therefore, plebeian culture is rebellious, but rebellious in defense of customs. The customs defended are those of the people themselves (Lander, 2000, p. 9).
This is an important point, and a consideration that within the NMS will have to be worked on; urban contexts with their own dynamics and “modern” ways of life reintroduce the school as a space or environment of acquisition and not as one of learning. Hence, the importance of the three core points of this proposal: CSCP, CCF and teacher autonomy. The decree issued by the Government of Mexico (2019) in Article 24 outlines the integral perspective that is sought to be realized, as well as the areas of knowledge: (1) natural and experimental sciences, (2) social sciences and (3) humanities. These fields were planned in such a way that they would express transversal disciplines, that is, content present in integral problems such as mathematics, history, communication, arts, etc. Isolated disciplines lose ground. The field of humanities and social sciences is where the proposal of decoloniality can have the greatest relevance, not in an instrumental way because, as has been argued, the decolonial perspective is not a recipe but a different way of understanding and a possibility of acting that implies commitment. In this way, it is intertwined with humanism, which is present as an axiological formula permeated as a socio-philosophical category.
A virtue of the NMS is that when speaking of areas of knowledge, a specific discipline is not being proposed, an element that can be favorable for interdisciplinary work. However, a visible disadvantage is that the conception of social sciences is not being deepened either, and that is the warning we can take from Lander (2000) when he said that hegemonic visions “have as their basis the defeat of that resistance” (p. 9) by naturalizing the historical conditions that give rise to the market in social life. Inscribing oneself in a field of knowledge for any teaching community requires a critical discourse that can distance itself from the progressive, linear and finalist narrative of development (biological, economic, political and historical). In the same way, the area of humanities as a socio-philosophical category requires a rupture with developmentalist and Eurocentric visions, which do not lead to the demerit of the international contribution but to the non-subordination of an alien form; in short, we have to recognize the presence of the coloniality of knowledge that can be subverted by decolonial dialogs in an intra-institutional way.
Educational processes are not devoid of ideological content; problematizing the history of philosophy, assuming that it began in Greece, should not be an exclusive matter for academics as a critical discourse; here, the aim is to revalue regional forms of thought, and this is a possibility to think of non-colonial alternatives in the teaching of humanities or social sciences. This, as has been argued, necessarily calls for a critical dialog and a re-evaluation of the scope of decolonial proposals because, at their core, although they pursue an emancipatory horizon, they do not intend an evaluation of the content exposed in a school but a resignification of the human experience. In the proposal of humanities as an area of knowledge of the NMS, it is intended to dimension the human being in more complex ways, not limiting oneself to content or the market, and this leads us to think about the coloniality of being.
The strategy of the NMS is to speak of dimensioning the experience in the educational process, which links it to an important philosophical area: the ethical sense. This can be understood as the form of relationship with otherness, not dividing the human sphere from the natural one, but integrating it with degrees of complexity, but in search of social, community and environmental well-being. Maldonado-Torres (2008a, b) has developed the intuition of what a “decolonial attitude” implies as an ethical and political stance, a relevant theme for the articulation of the NMS. In an interesting way, he develops his argument by establishing the relationship between attitude and “decolonial reason” and argues for his proposal, the need for:
…to put at the center of the debate the question of colonization as a constitutive component of modernity, and decolonization as an indefinite number of strategies and contestatory forms that propose a radical change in the current hegemonic forms of power, being, and knowing. (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a, b, p. 66)
Having colonization as the center of thought in its multiple degrees and transferring it to the educational field implies a study and deepening of the grievance, an element that has aroused concerns about whether it is the indicated direction for the search for peace. It is noteworthy that we are not facing a new theory or a new perspective of a pedagogical, didactic or educational nature, but rather a reorientation and recovery of sensitivity, addressing needs beyond individualism and a constant reminder that conflict can occur, counting on the possibility of non-violent solutions for its resolution, avoiding the grievance again. The decolonial attitude can be understood as the dignification and reorientation of the ethical sense of our being in the world. This element cannot be fully recovered by state planning without the presence of teaching communities, which is a great challenge that leads to the question of “how,” the procedural question of dimensioning humanism and its contents or of promoting this de-colonial attitude.
A relevant element that could shed light on the NMS, although it does not completely solve this operational problem, refers to the configuration of historical consciousness, which is understood as a socio-cognitive resource (SEMS, 2024), that is, articulating learning. Something similar to what Freire (1984) called the creative elements of literacy, unlinked from the exclusive memorization of signs. A way of being immersed in reality and its takes on relevance for emancipatory projects and has a depth that links it to propitiating the attitude defined by Maldonado-Torres (2008a, b).
The challenge of placing coloniality at the center of the discussion can be expressed in the explanations about the violence of the conquest process or, in general, those experiences that have been experienced as a grievance in various regional, national, or global scenarios. As mentioned previously, the criticisms against this project are that this teaching tends to the mobilization of hostile attitudes or that in its development it is not linked to a practical context. It seems to me that those who incur these criticisms have not understood that it is about placing before the idea that every social phenomenon has historicity and is the result of a complex process in such a way that it does not necessarily mobilize an attitude of hostility towards the other. The historical narrative recreates an instrument of memory that allows us to understand ourselves in differences and seeks the empathetic point. Maldonado-Torres (2007) expresses the need to evaluate ontologies and their forms of reproduction; if the coloniality of being functions as a moment of forgetting ethics (p. 259), re-dimensioning being, in an educational practice, is indispensable and passes through the change of narrative as well as experiential processes.
The theme is not limited to this; the way of inhabiting or experiencing the school also demands its transformation, but it as an institution has remained insurmountable due to administrative forms of difficult restructuring. The complexity of this possible reading is that if we focus exclusively on the contents and didactics, we neglect the administrative character, but if we focus on the administrative, it will be difficult to touch the necessary content. Working on emancipatory projects at the level of public policy is a challenge we must face, and it is not exempt from contradictions; I want to point out then how the decolonial attitude impacts educational public policy, particularly in the NMS.
There are several examples that can express the search for the resignification of our experience, and as Maldonado-Torres (2008a, b) suggests, they place coloniality as the axis of discussion. I will distinguish two of them: (1) the change of name of a disciplinary content that resignifies the sense of teaching a language at the national level, seeking recognition, and (2) a moment of historical discussion of the grievance that can modify our way of understanding philosophy as a monolith.
In the first place, the univocal denomination of curricular content at different levels was hierarchical and privileged a normalizing vision; during previous years to the NMS, the teaching of “Spanish” as the national language was the axis; this has a history that is not exempt from difficulties. As Arnaut (1998) points out, from the efforts of José María Luis Mora and Gómez Farías, who would have promoted the obligatoriness of instruction, to what was mentioned by De Knauth (1975), where liberal reforms sought to homogenize and promote a secular and civic morality, including periods where Justo Sierra or José María Vigil thought of the national in teaching. These events have in common an element for Ballesteros Paez (2017): a sense of discomfort of the multiple indigenous presences in the nation. Thinkers like Altamirano (1871) pointed out how the Catholic vision predominated in schools, where poor and indigenous people from any region were forced to be instructed in Spanish and saw in the teacher a fundamental axis of change or regression, urging that the teacher instruct for the community, not in Spanish, a form that he captured in his brief novel – the multiple elements of the educational ideal of Mexico at the end of the 19th century – guided by the State patiently and mentions:
…if the State has to carry it out only through those not always enlightened apostles who are called “school teachers”; because these, many times, in order not to fight with the spirit of the people who support them and with the interests of the priests, conform [SIC] to vicious customs, and are, unfortunately, their effective propagators in childhood, which tomorrow will be the people inheriting the traditions. (Altamirano, 1871, p. 72)
In the NMS, a teaching subject with years of tradition has ceased to be called Spanish; now the contents are reorganized under the label of multiple languages, which symbolically allows recognizing the linguistic diversity of the vast national territory; this is a guideline in the modification of the colonized experience, re-dimensioning the complexity of history. This change expresses an institutional desire for recognition, but being critical of the proposal, this desire is the product of struggles that claimed it as a right; I think it is important to continue deepening these types of changes and that they are not limited to the nominal.
Our second point that contributes to re-signifying our experience corresponds to the fundamental questioning of philosophical teaching. Frequently, modernity is spoken of since Descartes, and the unofficial consensus of didactics is to start with the European, without considering characters like Alonso de la Veracruz, who was an integral opponent of the visions of the empire of Charles V; his philosophy started from the struggle against the domination and exploitation of the Spanish crown since 1554 (Velasco, 2009). A good part of these debates, such as the Valladolid polemic of 1550 or the proposal of the School of Salamanca, are temporally framed in humanism, and it is fundamentally the ethical vision about other peoples and their right to be. Mexican humanism can be identified under three characteristics: “republican, anti-imperialist and multiculturalist” (Velasco, 2009, p. 22).
While we could criticize the idea of a unified humanism, it is necessary that many humanisms be thought of within the historical configuration of the nation, in the same way that diverse reinterpretations of it, such as that of Lombardo Toledano (1930) when he expressed a deep humanistic sense in the Mexican revolution, were enthusiastic about educating and putting the Ateneo of youth as referents. Here it was mentioned that this group “needed to bring the spirit back to the pure sources of philosophy and the humanities, seeing as it was necessary to generalize ideas not only among the educated class but also among the people” (Lombardo Toledano, 1930, p. 38). Although Toledano's interpretation of humanism can be labeled as anthropocentric, finalist and Eurocentric and with a polemical sense, or, in sum, that it is inevitable that it incurs a colonial knowledge, a historical attitude is indispensable that urges us to understand that philosophical work is to make the indispensable criticism to re-dimension ourselves in more complex ways; hence, the configuration between historical consciousness and humanism with a greater sense of depth and supported by a decolonial reading.
The decolonial imperative is that a practice or a concept “cannot take the form of a new universal imperialism” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 261). And this is where the contextualization of knowledge takes place in what Mignolo (2011 & 2000) expressed as options that reconfigure local knowledge by revaluing the active experience in the configuration of the world:
I understand social and cultural configurations through discourses (in words, painting, cinema, video, web pages, etc.) that are being produced in situ, or at a distance, although committed to the debates in situ and not only to the events. Is it possible to get out of the illusion of “talking about something” beyond our experience, of only knowing it from a distance (...) to achieve a theoretical, objective, or scientific perspective that is above the colors and the experiential understanding of the actors involved? (Mignolo, 2011, pp. 60–61)
The experiential character is one of the bases of this proposal, hence its integrative form. The examples presented, about the diversity of peoples and the construction of knowledge, are problems that persist today. Not only that, they are just a sample. Navarrete (2017) has worked on a semantic network of terms associated with racist practices in Mexico, a problem that persists today and that permeates not only among groups of young people but also in all public and private sectors. The NMS that I managed to place the question of colonization will inevitably touch the problem of racism in Mexico from a perspective that is expected to be novel.
In turn, the eight principles of the NMS (Secretaría de Educación Pública SEP, 2019) or the expressions of Mexican humanism are elements that seek a different understanding in the identity processes that affect teaching practices. Thus, the Ministry of Public Education (2019) mentioned that these eight principles can be cataloged as follows (Secretaría de Educación Pública SEP, 2019, pp. 3 to 10):
National identity: It seeks to foster an appreciation for culture and its history, understanding a dialectical process between that which makes us, making it.
Citizen responsibility: Acceptance of personal and common rights and duties, with empathy as the fundamental value.
Honesty: As a fundamental behavior based on trust and the support of truth in actions.
Participation: It seeks a transformation of the various levels where it is inscribed in search of common well-being.
Respect for human dignity: Unrestricted recognition of the right to existence of the other. Considering the individual as part of a community and integrated into it, in search of substantive equality.
Interculturality: Understanding and appreciation for cultural and linguistic diversity, integrating knowledge from a transdisciplinary perspective.
Culture of peace: Promotes dialog, solidarity and the search for agreements for a non-violent solution of conflicts and respect for differences.
Respect for nature and care for the environment: Environmental awareness for the protection and conservation of environments, integrating the individual into their environmental niche.
The axiological component of the NMS is not a novelty. It can be understood as a value reorganization of historical processes. The criticism would lead us to the consideration that, as principles, they should permeate all educational expression. Placing colonization at the center of the debate implies recovering regional knowledge, making its production and dissemination a priority. Figures like Herrera Zapién (2000) defended the idea that there is no underdevelopment of these themes in our regions (pp. 218–219); the moment has come to reintroduce them into the institutional and educational sphere.
Dussel (2020) spoke of transitional processes towards new institutions (pp. 10 to 21) and considered necessary the recovery of the ethical foundation of cultures themselves, the valuation of one's own tradition that allows us to convene a dialog (2020, p. 33). Again, the meaning changes profoundly if we consider the national identity processes that were reproduced with decontextualized readings and without putting coloniality as the axis of discussion and criticism. Quijano (1988) clearly expressed the contradiction as a term of struggle and the need to demystify instrumental rationality as the only possible one (p. 5). The study of the national identity process without a decolonial attitude deprived the educational process of its complexity.
In the NMS, this circumstance takes on new tensions; the concept of Mexican sensitivity as they made us believe it was thought by Chávez (1900), or the “feeling of inferiority” that Ramos (1934) alluded to, or the “sons of la chingada” of Paz (1950), can be understood as inherent visions in the coloniality of knowledge that are reproduced instrumentally, torn from their complex and disputed histories, presenting them as universalizing. The national identity process has been so diverse that one cannot speak of a single Mexicanity; we could not say that this is the exclusive work of the NMS, but it is true that other possible readings are recognized and emancipatory proposals have played a role. In the words of Fanon, “The white man creates the black man, but it is the black man who creates negritude” (1950, p. 30).
This supposes that the incomprehensible, artificial and denominative category of the colonial world and of the instrumental vision does not contain the possibility of recognition, although in fact it is there. Levinas expressed, “Politics tends towards reciprocal recognition, that is, towards equality: it ensures happiness. And the political law ends and consecrates the struggle for recognition” (2002, p. 87). And this is a key step; Fanon took the veil of the Algerian as an explanatory form of subversive processes; in the same way, the national identity process gives the guidelines for possible emancipatory readings, which cannot be dismissed by the model that is presented as an educational reform.
It is not a question of replacing one content with another but of putting it in dialog, recognizing and fraternizing with differences. These elements, although fundamental, are simplistic premises of deeper ones. A way to delve philosophically into this is to understand the vision of figures like Maldonado-Torres (2008a, b), who, following Levinas, expresses that speaking of fraternity can be insufficient if differences and transcendences are not considered (p. 66). This reiterates that an irreplaceable figure, i.e. the teaching communities, that leads these expressions in the area of humanities has an important role.
This point for the NMS is important; although the recognition of diversity is raised, debates on secular ethics are opened, or attention is paid to the experiential process, this comes from the State and its agents, which in this case refers to the teacher, and it is risky to underestimate the colonial habit internalized in organizations. The teacher plays a key role; this was clear to Latapí Sarre (2004), who evaluates the institutional role of the teaching profession in its union organization, giving a diagnosis that despite the time remains valid: there is a forced dialog regarding academic content and pedagogical orientations due to practical needs of instrumentalization of reforms, the role of the State is important in evaluation processes, in a formative sense (pp. 10–11).
Teaching and institutions play important roles in the implementation of the NMS, and I find it necessary to recognize limits between decolonial proposals and educational practices, which can only be blurred by establishing continuous dialogs between proposals and practices, facilitated by the educational institution. An interesting challenge for the decolonial perspective is whether it can establish a dialog in a didactic sense, in collaboration with the actors of the NMS. In practical terms, working through projects, which is a fundamental piece in this proposal, becomes a problem because it is based on active dynamics that integrate content; this assembly is expected to be carried out, discussed and agreed upon in the so-called technical councils, these being collective spaces of organization and educational planning of each school for adequate management in the learning progressions. Diversifying educational practices is not a simple issue; the processes of continuous formation and the assignment of places for public teaching are aspects that exceed the teacher and are elements that must be addressed sooner or later in the reform.
Fanon mentioned that “the cracks of colonialism, above all subjective, are the result of a victory of the colonized over the ancient fear and over the ambient despair distilled day after day by a colonialism installed in a perspective of eternity” (1950, p. 35). This allows us to understand how from absences one can derive a possible political action contextualized to real needs. It is true that there are those who see the NMS as an ideological process, but this perspective of education has a properly educational meaning for the diverse peoples of Mexico, which is to establish education as a right that, based on principles, establishes ends above private interest, gradually moving away from education as a manufacturing process. Díaz Barriga (2014) expresses that the tension between utopia and reality in the educational process is constant; “The tension between both perspectives is enormous. It is not enough with good purposes in educational projects, when graduates (...) will join a labor world governed by purely economic rules, where the big one devours the small one” (Díaz Barriga, 2014, p. 50). It would be of little value to have great concepts if they do not reach the classroom properly; therefore,
All curricular design has a utopian sense; it is about thinking of a better student training model than what is currently available. This requires making the curricular proposal with great seriousness, with substantive elements that guarantee that something better than the current one is effectively being proposed and, above all, taking care that the proposal does not remain only on the approved paper. The obligation of a new curricular design is how it becomes a utopia in each classroom, in the work of each teacher and in the learning of each student (Díaz Barriga, 2014, p. 73).
An important challenge is that a reform that profoundly changes practice cannot operate with the same institutional structures; this demands a change in Mexico's own Ministry of Education, which could indeed signify a problem due to the diverse interests that exist within it.
Conclusion
The veil is being abandoned in the course of the action (Fanon, 1959, p. 45)
We are far from having exposed the NMS in detail, but I consider that in nuclear terms significant points have been traced, which allow us to understand it as a political reform of education that has a degree of seriousness. It is possible to analyze how it is developing and in what ways it can be supported. I want to emphasize that the need for dialog with the decolonial tradition is not limited exclusively to the area of humanities and social sciences but extends also to natural and experimental sciences. It seems to me that there are links with decolonial readings, such as that of Nelson Maldonado-Torres. The need to make a critique of conceptions such as race and how these were clothed in a scientific character is a problem that the history of science has been responsible for clarifying but has not reached the classrooms of basic education, and following Maldonado-Torres (2008a, b), the colonial question is placed at the center to be analyzed with a decolonial attitude.
However, clear limits are also expressed in the viability of the NMS. Structures that have been presented as insurmountable at the administrative and institutional level in the face of a reform that puts teaching communities at the center. Regaining trust in these communities is an important principle considering that there are neoliberal habits in organizational forms and a resignification of teaching as a creative act based on express principles that take up ethical imperatives. This vision is not disarticulated from technical capacities but rather reoriented.
Thinkers like Fanon understood that the technical instrument is inserted into the colonial situation (1950, p. 53); an example was the radio, which functioned in an oppressive sense, and with a different practice, the instrument was reconfigured. We cannot deny that the impetus to create new dimensions of society beyond the mercantile is encouraging, but we must deepen the fact that behind exploitation there are important elements to dismantle. It is not a question of a forced assembly but of constant dialogs that allow adjustments to models with promises and principles. Maldonado-Torres has argued that decoloniality has to contribute to the reorganization of knowledge, which cannot be limited to the field of humanities but is extensive to disciplines such as biology (Maldonado-Torres, 2006, p. 163). It implies that interdisciplinary studies today are necessary and coincident with the processes of integration of knowledge in the NMS; the need to create a new humanism is rooted in institutions such as educational ones, not only expanding the role of the academic but also linking it directly to the teaching-learning process.
The NMS opens a possibility of reorganizing teaching, not only at basic but also higher levels, generating an increasingly deep link with our histories and regional knowledge. The theme that has been raised by figures such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres has more and more echoes today. There is a risk of making these perspectives “branch-office” formulas, as mentioned by Pereda (2012), but the truth is that the NMS privileges a deep sensitivity with respect to the recent past, with symptomatic ravages that still persist: migratory processes, racism, inequality gaps, machismo and misogyny are disarticulated with public policies, but also with this type of educational component that privileges ethical principles.
In our recent past, the disappearance of philosophical and humanistic content was intentionally sought; today a serious analysis of the ravages caused by these visions is important, since criticisms that have as their basis deception forget that “the lie of the occupant becomes a positive aspect of the new truth of the Nation” (Fanon, 1959, p. 56). Criticisms of the NMS educational model have not been in a pedagogical, didactic tenor or under a serious analytical approach but rather of a crudely colonial character. And it is precisely a measured reflection that calls us to this work to delve into certain fields with a flexible and situated direction. It is indispensable to give a debate that seeks significance in the formative field of humanities; the decolonial approach has relevance because it can start from non-Western histories, recognizing other knowledge. Is this enough? In our opinion, it is an important step, but it cannot be limited to this; therefore, it must be accompanied by political actions that express congruence with the principles that are defended. We must deepen our understanding, recognizing that other forms of teaching are possible.
The decolonial perspective that has been mentioned is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012), and it is not only a perspective that seeks to complement but also to deepen to give space to other places. This supposes that it can become uncomfortable. It is true that decolonial readings are not homogeneous, but we must recognize that the NMS is not a field free of contradictions and that there are still issues to clear up. It is insisted that the articulating axis are the teaching communities, and it is they themselves who have the possibility of deepening the institutional changes that modify colonial and mercantilist organizational forms.
Although the reappropriation of the educational system leads us to multiple problems, Aníbal Quijano, with great acuity, explained, “In the vast “periphery”, the coloniality of power blocked the full democratization and nationalization of societies and states, and today (...) they continuously reduce the spaces gained and in many cases have managed to almost annul them” (Quijano, 2002, p. 25); hence, these processes and reforms are thought of as a way to recover key spaces for sociability. It is worthwhile to think for Mexico of a school as a learning environment. The great problem is that systemically the school has been organized as a classificatory system. A step that this educational reform will have to assess is to ensure that administrative needs are adjusted to educational practices and not the other way around.
