The higher education that changed Portugal
Few days before the end of the current year, it is pertinent to remember two events from six decades ago: the academic crisis of 1962 and the appointment of Veiga Simão as the first rector of the new university in Mozambique. Both deserve mention.
Education was instrumentalized by the Estado Novo as a tool of accommodation. Collective anesthesia was facilitated by a rejected mandatory schooling, which at one point lasted just three years. The formatting of thought was helped by unique programs and books, and deepened thanks to the separate instruction of boys and girls. Higher education was for an elite and its expansion was a risk.
The academic crisis of 1962 showed that collective anesthesia was not general anesthesia. University students proved to be wide awake, uniting around freedom of association and university autonomy. National Student Day, on March 24, commemorates one of the episodes of that year.
When establishing higher education in Mozambique, Veiga Simão did not fail to reflect on its transformative role. His appointment as Minister of Education, in 1970, after a new academic crisis in 1968, allowed him to initiate a profound educational reform and expand the higher education network – in a way that we had never seen or seen again.
Despite opposition from the most conservative sectors of the Estado Novo, who thought that democratizing education would be the same as “giving any citizen the right to be a doctor” and “any donkey the right to be a horse”, Veiga Simão did not give up on education, which considered a “sacred principle”.
In 1973, it published the first Teaching Basic Law, which instituted compulsory eight-year schooling, and then the diploma that created four universities – Aveiro, Évora, Minho and Nova de Lisboa – and even two dozen other higher education institutions, all over the country.
It would be the April revolution to postpone the process and make it a reality. Even so, Marçal Grilo, Minister of Education (1995-99), stated that the creation of the new universities had been the most relevant event in the context of higher education since the creation of universities in Lisbon and Porto, in 1911.
The events of 60 years ago meant that Portugal could now have levels of qualification and higher education institutions that are indisputable vectors of progress and social transformation, and that is why I recall them.
It’s worth thinking about.
*Rector of the University of Aveiro