The identity reference of the Mexican basic education curriculum: Causes and consequences of curricular injustice

Abstract

The article addresses the complex plots of historical interrelations and educational policy, which make up the identity reference of the curriculum of Mexican basic education, considered here as the main cause of what neoliberal logic calls great problems of education: lag and desertion, among others, which are assumed in this writing as symptoms of curricular injustice. The development of this thesis points to the need for revising the category of the ‘national’ as an empty signifier and its validity as an identity reference, the tensions that currently cross it and the weakening of the nationalist discourse in today’s Mexico. In order to achieve this, some theoretical tools of the political analysis of the discourse are used as an analytical one that goes to the critical understanding – that nonlinear or positive – about the curriculum of the basic Mexican education.

Keywords: discourse, national identity, curricular injustice.