The Guadalajara Reporter

‘One cannot read a book: one can only reread it’

Very few of my campesino friends read newspapers – or, actually, much of anything, besides the directions on livestock feed sacks, and medicines for both animals and their families. 

“The Country That Stopped Reading,” by David Toscana, an internationally much heralded Mexican (Monterrey) author, appeared recently in The New York Times.   “Nowadays, more children (in Mexico) attend school than ever before, but they learn less,” he writes. “How is it that I hand over a child for six hours ever day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”  (Toscana wrote that just as the head of the huge Mexican teachers‘ union, Ester Elba Gordillo, was detained for allegedly  embezzling millions of dollars from the union whose members inherit, or purchase or get their jobs from the union, or by performing favors for their superiors.)  He speaks of an educational system so corruptly managed that no one knows how many teachers, students, or schools there are in Mexico.  But the government and the mainstream media says repeatedly there are 1.5 million members in the union – though that too may be false, besides many of them don’t teach, they are occupied with managing and nourishing the union. 

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