Tools for Injustice: Control and Exclusion to Prevent Demands for a True Education. Mexico and Latin America

The persistence of an educational system based on the combination of rigid forms of evaluation -meant to exclude hundreds of thousands from their right to access or permanence in an educational institution- and the use of diverse mechanisms of social control to ensure that teachers, parents and students are subordinated to the system´s rules even if they cannot guarantee a successful outcome that links education, social integration and employment, has increased both tension and frustration in schools and communities. The result of this tension can be the eruption of a protest movement, but mostly, it is producing massive students´desertion, isolation and self exclusion in significant cases, both in rural and urban regions, all through Latin America and many other parts of the world. Resistance against the prevailing rules and educational system can also adopt the form of adoption of different forms of involvement in so called informal/virtual/distant forms of education, or total renunciation to receive any institutional education. Some of the present alternatives are, however, linked to family or community survival strategies. These have proven to be useful and often, more satisfactory than what the prevailing institutions have to offer.