MEXICO CITY—Hanibal Yesbel, an energetic, athletic actor, looks into the camera and goes into an intense, soulful rap about triangles. He isn’t talking romance, but geometry.
“Did you know not all angles are equal?” says the 36-year-old actor, reading from a teleprompter as he stands in front of a desk on a set made up to look like a classroom.
His lines are for an unseen audience of millions of fourth-graders watching him on television starting this week. It is part of an experiment in Mexico to hold all public school classes via television during the coronavirus pandemic.
In much of the world, schools are debating whether to have in-person classes or let children stay at home and take classes via the internet.
In Mexico, where more than 60,000 people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, the government has decided it is too dangerous to send children back to school. It has also decided, because of spotty internet access in much of the country, that its only choice is to offer education by television to its more than 30 million public school students, at least until the end of this year. The classes will also be available on the internet, which will play a secondary role to television, education ministry officials said.
A consortium of public and private television networks will broadcast lessons from pre-K through high school for 18 commercial-free hours a day, on unused digital channels. To squeeze in all the grade levels, each child’s school day will last just 2½ hours.
The alliance is made up of the government channel and Mexico’s four main private TV networks. It includes Grupo Televisa, the world’s largest Spanish-language media company, famous for its steamy soap operas, and TV Azteca, which is owned by Ricardo Salinas Pliego, whom many count as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s closest ally among Mexico’s business elite.
Mexican students attended class on their TV on Monday.
Photo: Jacky Muniello/Zuma PressMexico’s decision to rely on television highlights the country’s low internet penetration and vast social inequality, which make it impossible to have online classes in large parts of the country.
While 93% of Mexican households have access to television, according to a 2019 survey by Mexico’s national statistics agency, only 56% have access to the internet, which is often slow and suffers frequent interruptions. Just 44% of households have access to a computer.
Other Latin American countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Chile have also made television part of a mix of teaching methods during the Covid-19 emergency, but Mexico’s effort appears to be the most reliant on television.
“It’s better than nothing,“ said Marco Fernández, an education expert with the Tecnologico de Monterrey university. ”They didn’t have many options given the low internet connectivity, the few laptops per student and the fact that Mexico doesn’t have a truly national public TV network.” Mexico’s main public broadcaster covers just 70% of the country.
Mexicans already spend more than five hours daily watching TV, according to Mexico’s telecommunications agency, one of the highest rates in the world. The decision to go to television for education during the pandemic could increase those sedentary hours, which experts say is one reason for Mexico’s high rates of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Mexican officials acknowledge that education via television is far from ideal.
Television “is a ‘cold medium’ without interaction,” said Jose Luis Gutierrez, a Mexican education ministry official, on a Unesco Zoom seminar explaining Mexico’s decision to Latin American education officials. “It’s tough to hold students’ attention.”
Mr. Gutierrez said programs would have to be short—they are about 20 minutes long—to not bore students.
Preparations for the taping of a school program in Mexico City at the studios of Once television, where a map, below, illustrates the network’s reach.
Photo: Luis Antonio Rojas for The Wall Street Journal (2)
Other Latin American countries are watching Mexico’s experiment closely, said Cristobal Cobo, a senior education and technology specialist at the World Bank. He said the success of the program would depend largely on how much interaction takes place between students and teachers.
Some parents worry that not being in class means their children will fall further behind in a country that ranks in the bottom third of 79 countries in standardized test scores for reading, math and science skills, among nations surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Just 1% of Mexican students were top performers in at least one subject; the OECD average is 16%.
“You put them in front of a television set and they see it, but from what they see to what they absorb is a big jump,” said Yaolis Villagomez, who will have three daughters attending school through television, a 9-year-old starting fifth grade, a 10-year-old in sixth grade and a preschooler. “You have to supervise and you don’t have time. It’s going to be tough.”
Elizabeth Figueroa, a school director in the southern state of Chiapas, said her school has a plan to coordinate with parents to stay in touch with children via WhatsApp before and after the TV classes to answer questions, get feedback and set up complementary activities to fortify learning.
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Props rest on the set during the recording of a home-learning program at a Once studio.
Photo: Luis Antonio Rojas for The Wall Street JournalShe has doubts the model will work. Poverty is endemic in much of rural Mexico. For instance, she said, 30% of her 150 students have no TV set at home because their parents were forced to sell them amid the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. Because many parents live paycheck to paycheck, they will have to leave their children alone at home, which will make it difficult to monitor that the children follow the classes.
“If the TV content is not attractive enough, I think the kids will just change the channel,” she said.
Educators and broadcasters at the government channel are working late into the night to turn the scripts provided by Mexico’s education ministry into programs. Classes will be taught by a duet made up of an actor or actress who will play the role of an inquisitive student and a professor picked by the education ministry. Mr. Yesbel, the actor, will introduce some segments for the start of the school year.
“They are professors selected because of their teaching ability in front of groups, and have a well recognized academic profile,” said Marcos Bucio, the deputy secretary of education in charge of primary education.
The private media firms will get paid roughly $20 million to offset their costs, officials said.
Televisa and TV Azteca saw their stock prices soar, 11% and 7% respectively, the day after the arrangement was announced. Investors were reassured that the government is on good terms with both firms, analysts said.
Some teachers see the move as part of a political arrangement between the government and the private TV networks ahead of next year’s midterm election. “The president is seeking to have a good relationship with the TV networks and add up allies,” said Eloy López, the leader of a powerful radical dissident teachers group in the poor state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico.
Mr. López told reporters his group wouldn’t cooperate with the government’s television plan, which it considered discriminatory to poor rural students, and would stage protests and marches instead.
Mr. Bucio, the education deputy minister, denied any political motive in the government’s agreement with private broadcasters.
School and Covid-19
Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com and Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com
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