Breathe
By Sofía Guadarrama
In several campaign speeches, Claudia Sheinbaum said that education should not be a privilege, but a right, with which I fully agree.
In Mexico, an upper-class student never has to worry about walking two hours in the bush to get to elementary school or staying at the institution where he or she will study. They don't even have to take an entrance exam. And if you want, you can finish your degree without doing your homework because nowadays there are formally established companies that charge for doing homework, essays, reports and even university theses, such as "Homework Dealer", owned by Natalia Antonoff, former candidate for a federal congressional seat for District 22 for Movimiento Ciudadano. What "Homework Dealer" does is not new. It is a practice as old as modern academic institutions. There are private universities that allow students to graduate without an exam, just by paying for a master's degree.
Between 1999 and 2008 I worked teaching in private schools. I received dozens of plagiarized or cloned assignments. Unfortunately, I had to see students who reached university level with the spelling of a first grader. Héctor Abad Faciolince says that "Bad spelling is the bad breath of writing". I had students who on the first day of classes asked me why they had to take a history or literature course if they were going to be engineers.
I will share an even worse anecdote: a few years ago a moderately famous writer (who is not my friend), and who boasts a PhD, wrote me on Facebook Messenger to ask me a question. The spelling in his message was terrifying. Something dreadful. This was someone who enjoys the privilege of being called a writer and he was writing like the donkey in the living room. How is this possible? Is it because he graduated from private schools? I don't think so. Careful. I am not generalizing.
