Cultural Diversity and Educationally Backward: The Case of Mexican Indigenous Population

Susana Carolina Guzmán-Rosas

PhD Program on Science, Technology and Society, Cinvestav-IPN, Mexico City, Mexico.

DOI: 10.4236/ce.2015.615167                

Abstract

From a systematic review of scientific publications and diverse research materials, this article identifies and characterizes the elements that affect in educationally backward of the Mexican indigenous population, showing the current scene that supports and prolongs the above mentioned problematic. In this way, it was found that the Mexican indigenous population has remarkable disadvantages in contrast to the non-indigenous national population in what concerns the rate of educationally backward and his components: the poverty, the monolingualism, the discrimination, the bad quality in the indigenous education and the geographical distribution of the scholar centers. Consequently, each one of these elements constitutes a strong problematic, shaping and perpetuating the circle of indigenous educationally backward who is supported by a series of public policies that commit an outrage against the cultural diversity and evidence a model assimilationist of national education, demonstrating in real terms that Mexico is not a multicultural country because it doesn’t promote either the valuation or the knowledge of indigenous peoples, besides the existence of an evident relation of symbolic domination between the stakeholders of the Mexican indigenous population and those of the non-indigenous national population.

Keywords

Cultural Diversity, Educationally Backward, Indigenous Education, Racial Discrimination, Symbolic Domination

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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