Jared A. Wilkerson and Dr. Harold Miller, Psychology
Providing regular education in rural Mexico has been a focus for the Mexican government for the last few decades. Even twenty years ago, many teachers were quite unwilling to visit rural areas, where the facilities and transportation were far under par. By the beginning of this decade, however, kindergarten and elementary schools had reached even the most remote parts of the country, with middle schools and high schools increasingly accessible to all potential students. Seeing the still-low rates of rural student matriculation, and especially noting the extremely low rates of male education, I wondered what inhibited youth from finishing, or even reaching, a formal education beyond elementary school.
To detect the inhibitions, I started with official declaration. The Mexican government published a 2000-2006 federal plan for education that identified problems in rural communities in general. The plan recognized two specific issues: poverty, and distance from schools. Why were gender issues not addressed, recognizing that many more girls attend than boys? Could these be the only major barriers to education, or was something else playing a role in stopping the students?
In order to answer that question, I went to rural Mexico, spending more than three months in a few rural villages twenty miles outside of Irapuato, Guanajuato. The villages are home to people whose lives depend on the land: they are corn farmers and herders. While there, I lived and worked with village residents, offering my services as a tutor and laborer, and allowing them to offer services as hosts and cultural experts. Through many interviews and weeks of participant observation, the question of whether or not there was more than distance and money underlying the low matriculation rate started to come into focus.
The first factor I noted in the villages leading to a stoppage of education, which agreed with the federal education plan, was the distance. The students who attend elementary school traveled about a hundred yards to get to class. Those who attend middle school walked a mile or two. High school students took a one-hour, dusty bus ride at 6:00 AM, and college students went even farther. Why was the distance such a problem? For most, the issue was usually not distance, but gender-based opportunity cost. Families who participate in farming and herding require their sons either to be at home in order to take on one of these jobs or to participate in the economic sustenance of the family. A two-hour bus ride, plus the six hours school requires, would leave many families with more to do than hands to work. Since boys are generally expected to help in the fields and with the animals more than girls are, many parents kept them home.
The second factor I recognized in the lives of high school students was also in line with the federal education plan: lack of money. Distance and money are highly interconnected, since traveling keeps kids from working at home, and since it costs money to ride the bus and pay for lunch outside the home kitchen. Other costs also arise, such as the intermittent use of internet cafés, payment for school maintenance and security, etc. Families generally have two sources of income: what they sell in terms of crops and animals, and what family members in the United States can wire to them. This leaves villagers with a very meager income, and families without relatives in the USA have even less.
I found one final factor that causes students to drop out of school: emigration. This is undoubtedly more of a cultural than a tangible cause. Many boys receive acculturation and encouragement to be strong and independent, to leave home behind and thus display that independence, to prove their strength by overcoming the border. Economic status and bragging rights are often linked to experience in the United States. The experience, however, usually begins with a first rite of passage crossing in a boy’s late teen years, followed by subsequent visits to the States. This creates at least two problems in the majority of boys’ thinking: 1) since they will halt academic progress when they turn sixteen or seventeen and go to the States, there is little reason to get much education before that. 2) Since status and money in the ranchos is highly connected to work in the USA, boys can profitably avoid education and still make a name for themselves among their neighbors.
This last finding was the most shocking, since the federal plan for education never mentioned the word “emigration” in the entire analysis of problems in rural communities. I believe that further anthropological/investigative work needs to be carried out, researching the possibility that the Mexican government knows of the negative educational effects that are caused by immigration but ignores them due to the positive economic effects. That is, further research needs to be done to determine whether the government sees education to be as important as economics. If the government is found to be ignorant of the harsh effects emigration is having on the education of its citizens, then efforts should be made to persuade them to consider this issue in their policy-making.