New Mexican School’s pedagogy seen from the Active School

Abstract

This text presents reflections on the pedagogy in the New Mexican School, analyzing it from the perspective of the Active School movement in Mexico that took place in the middle of the 20th century. The article is based on the history of the present time. It is also based on research on the New Mexican School and the approach of the Active School in the United States of America, which had a marked influence in Mexico. Methodologically, the analysis is made from the present-past relationship, taking up the official/legal documents that gave rise to the current educational project and confronting and/or comparing them with the approaches of the Active School of the 1920s. It is based on the written production that exists on this subject in Mexico and on reflections on educational reforms during neoliberalism in Mexico. The ideas of the last century serve to analyze the achievement of the reform of the New Mexican School. The article also analyses the way in which it distanced itself from the content (not from all of it) of the preceding reforms, especially those originated in the era of neoliberalism dating from 1992, 2004, 2009 and 2013, to arrive at the current reform in 2019. The finding is that the current educational reform is explained more clearly from the past (Active School). The conclusions recover the validity of the pedagogical ideas of the Active School, or New School, to explain the educational project of the present based on active methods and the use of the immediate context that have been, since the last century, the best facilitators for the achievement of significant learning in elementary school students in Mexico.