A Challenge for Mexico Education

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo pondered long and hard on how to recover the National Autonomous University campus from student strikers outraged by a plan to increase tuition from two cents a year to $100 for those who could afford it.

Zedillo had reason for pause. As a student in Mexico City in 1968 he felt the weight of the intolerant government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who, unable to deal with a student protest, sent in his soldiers. Hundreds of students were killed, giving Mexico an international black eye as it prepared to stage the Olympic Games that year.

Sunday morning, Zedillo ordered about 2,000 federal police to seize the campus and take down the barricades. They arrested more than 600 students and apparently broke the strike. To the president’s credit, there was no bloodshed.

This decision was the right one. Zedillo deserves the support he is getting from the majority of Mexicans, but now comes the hard part: dealing with the aftermath of the police operation.

Although the campus is back in official hands for the first time since April, the problems that led to the strike have not been solved. Young people who seek a way out of poverty are not finding the answers they need in the Mexican educational system. The poor cannot rise above their situation without education, and the economy is not waiting for them.

By June, the plan to raise the tuition had been dropped by university authorities, but other matters continued to fuel the strike. Education will be a key problem for Mexican administrations for years to come if issues of equity and fairness are not settled promptly.

Zedillo should start by releasing from jail those students swept up in Sunday’s raid. Classes should be resumed as soon as possible, and the university should come together to find a compromise in a congress of teachers, university officials, workers and students dedicated to reorganizing the institution.

Barring the poor from higher education cannot be a choice. Mexico will rise or fall with the educational skills of its coming generations.