Mexico's Director General of Educational Materials Sounds Alarm About Creeping Education Privatization

The following call was published by Marx Arriaga Navarro, Director General of Education Materials at Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Education, on December 25, 2025 and disseminated through his social media accounts. Since 2022 he has led the New Mexican School project and the development of free textbooks within the framework of Mexican Humanism, commissioned by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Committees of the Defense of the New Mexican School & Its Free Textbooks

The teachers who created the Free Textbooks (LTG), along with Marx Arriaga Navarro, call upon all free, insurgent souls with critical thinking and awareness to organize themselves into Committees for the Defense of the New Mexican School and its LTG. These committees are spaces for organization where the principles of Mexican Humanism and the 2022 Curriculum for preschool, primary, and secondary education are constantly promoted, as well as the values of Obradorism and the Fourth Transformation. All of this is to educate ourselves: first, in the philosophy, theology, and pedagogy of liberation; second, on the mechanisms used by state operators when implementing public policies for the privatization of education. Through this education, we will build popular power, a mass movement, under a clear political formation based on non-negotiable principles. Also, to agitate ourselves and become indignant about the injustices and inequalities that occur in our territories. Finally, and most importantly, to organize ourselves to develop political actions that defend public, popular, critical, emancipatory, and democratic education. In short, in the Committees we will educate ourselves, mobilize ourselves, and organize ourselves as real counterweights to the hegemonic powers and political operatives who seek to privatize education. Our goal will be to refound the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) and the National Education System to humanize it, put it at the service of the people, and fill it with delegates trained in critical thinking, social justice, and popular power.

Retrospective

Educate yourselves because we will need all our intelligence!

As a result of the Revolution of Consciences and the principles of Mexican Humanism, a battle was waged during the previous six-year term to halt the privatization of public education. Hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country succeeded in designing the 2022 Curriculum, which proposes an alternative to the instrumental and inhumane education that business blocks (OECD, IMF, World Bank, COPARMEX) have installed in the SEP’s public policies.

Without a doubt, the LTG (Teachers’ Guide Textbooks) were the territory where the struggle was most evident. Thousands of injunctions; two constitutional controversies; hundreds of articles in traditional and alternative media; thousands of political and administrative operations to stop the design, printing, and distribution of the LTG. All of them carried out by corrupt individuals, by public officials aligned with the interests of the perverse and inhumane business blocks. Political and administrative operations that demonstrated the animosity that the LTG and the New Mexican School (NEM) generated within the conservative block.

Since 2018, an educational transformation has been underway in Mexico, ranging from a constitutional reform to Article 3 and the General Law of Education; to the closure and dismissal of some oversight bodies such as the National Commission for Continuous Improvement of Education (MEJOREDU); to the cancellation of contracts with international companies or organizations such as CERLALC, Castillo Editores, Grupo SM, Editorial Trillas, Santillana, Grupo Nexos… for the design, illustration, or purchase of textbooks, study plans and programs, or educational materials; to the participation of millions of Mexicans in the design of the 2022 Study Plan and its General Laws.

Reading Reality

Agitate yourselves, because we will need all our enthusiasm!

While basic education is operated throughout the country under the principles of the 2022 Study Plan and the 107 books that make up the New Family of LTG are distributed, it is also true that the old practices of control and exercise of power of the neoliberal education model have been inherited, such as: simulation; administrative burdens; profiting from [providing] training, workbooks, educational materials, and lesson plans; coercion to deny teachers their right to professional autonomy; and the most serious: implementing the policies of COPARMEX, the OECD, UNESCO, the IMF, and the World Bank in the formation of a citizenry submissive to the neoliberal consumer system with basic skills mastery subordinate to business needs; without a critical consciousness that questions the injustices and inequalities in our territories, which have caused the war, hunger, disease, and death we experience.

Proof of this is the signing of the Mexico Learns By Reading Alliance with 11 states (Aguascalientes, Campeche, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Guanajuato, Nuevo León, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Yucatán), along with the Natura Institute Foundation, UNESCO, the Coppel Foundation, the Compartamos Foundation, Promotora Social México, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the SM Foundation, Zorro Rojo and others. These organizations aim to return to the competencies-based model of neoliberal education and displace the New Mexican Education Model (NEM). Another example are the Curriculum Support Notebooks for Teaching Practice: Development of Mathematical Skills, which the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) itself disseminated, where the Learning Teachers (LTG) and their critical transformative educational model are ignored.

Furthermore, the trend towards privatization of the National Education System continues by allowing the REVOE (Official Recognition of Studies) for the establishment of more private schools without regulation of: tuition fees, educational materials they request, uniforms, teachers’ salaries, the benefits they provide to their teaching staff… All of the above is operated by hundreds of municipal, state, and federal public officials who oppose Mexican Humanism and who, in clear resistance, are putting into practice a political strategy for the return of a traditional, conservative, classist, and meritocratic education; paving the way for Mexicanos Primero, and its satellite civil organizations, to profit from education and seize control of the SEP (Ministry of Public Education).

The Dream of the Future: The Prospective

Organize yourselves because we will need all our strength!

[I am] calling for the formation of Committees for the Defense of the NEM and its LTG implies recognizing that the Assault on Heaven that begin in 2018 is not yet complete. We have only conquered some corridors, but the grand avenues, the great halls, palaces, and dungeons are still in the hand of COPARMEX, the OECD, the IMF, the World Bank… For this reason, we say: the struggle continues!

All those insurgent souls who are willing to question the established powers that threaten the NEM and its LTG are called upon to organize themselves through Committees. Those who are so inclined, please access the following questionnaire, answer it and scan the QR code provided to register in the WhatsApp group where you will receive more information about the process of instruction, agitation, and organization.

https://forms.gle/yAhMNRhHwdMbYtu5

Although this call will remain permanently open and we will be establishing Committees throughout the country, from January 1st to February 1st, 2026, with those insurgent souls registered, we will begin a period of reflection to build our principles, the Dream of the Future, the prospects and the hope that will fuel our struggle.