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Teaching criminology in México
Teaching criminology

Author: Brenda Edith Cetina Juárez

Degree in criminology

January 21, 2022

For some years now, the teaching of criminology in Mexico has been based on the fact that the students enrolled for the bachelor's degree want to become investigators like those in the police series, in addition to being a "novelty" in schools, in which case they are just based on a misconception of the true work of criminology, the goals it pursues, and the hundreds of questions it needs to answer.

On the other hand, the influences that television series do not help much and have only caused future criminologists and the general population to have the false idea that solving cases takes hours and days, that a track solves everything and from there everything makes sense, the truth is that that does not happen, the demand is too high and the specialized and trained personnel, little, in addition to the enemies that we already know (the bureaucracy, corruption, favoritism, etc.).
If we turned to look at the criminology classrooms, what would we see? Would we see a classroom full of students eager to know, to know, to learn, students who are there out of obligation, students who are there because of the curiosity it causes them, we would see, among other aspects, the passion with which the teacher leads the class, would we see the teacher leave a reading and leave, a teacher dominate and know precisely what he is saying? As students, do we really know what we want and expect from a teacher? As teachers, do we know how to teach? Do we know how to give students the tools they need to perform the profession with honor?
Criminology is relatively new, and the truth is that there is very little bibliography in Spanish and written in Latin America, there is a lot in other languages and countries, but in Mexico at least, there is not a great variety and several authors consider that it has stagnated criminology and that teaching has become a series of vicious and unproductive repetitions, how to solve the problem? Wael Hikal, mentions that this lag of ideas and new research are based since the adolescent chooses the degree, this as a consequence of a bad professional orientation, that due to an aberration to mathematics and as he mentions a morbidity towards certain aspects of the career They make you choose it but during the course of it, if you manage to do an introspection, you can glimpse the enormous social responsibility that it entails.
But it is not all the fault of the new criminologists in process, the responsibility is also on those of us who already are, in our work as professionals, a work done with integrity and ethics, it is the responsibility of consolidated criminologists to continue with quality teaching , trying to leave a presence of our science, criminology. It is necessary to get involved in the action, not to lock ourselves in with the ideas of a decade ago, which although they are necessary references, are just that, references, stop being a character in literature, stop being absent and entities that wander aimlessly.

Bibliography
Hikal, W., Tolentino, JA, & Erosa, RA (2017). Black book of criminology teaching in Mexico. CDMX: Flowers.

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