Education in Portugal: a lost ideal
By António Carlos Cortez, teacher, poet, essayist
Paulo Freire (1921-1997) wrote in The Pedagogy of Indignation (Unesp, SP, 2000) that it is up to teachers to educate for a permanent questioning of the human condition. This questioning is not possible, as the same pedagogue teaches, when the global education system is based on a project of unbridled competition, of a fratricidal race for the already depleted energies of the planet, and of the Other.
Today, we live in an education lacking in purpose worthy of the name because it is greed, the feeling of ownership, profit and speculation of money that moves everything. Technological advances, in fact, only prove, in the classes that we see from the 1st cycle to the Secondary, from courses in higher schools, to Universities, the clear: despite the screens, despite the confirmation of digital skills acquired by many – students, teachers, guardians and other educational agents – there is a real generalized impoverishment of the quality of classes taught by a teaching class that has been exhausted, disenchanted and humiliated over decades.
No class takes place without a two-way relationship in the teaching-learning process. The teacher makes the classes and the interest in the subjects must result from a teaching that, erudite, instigating and free, arouses erudition in the students, the family of affections and intelligence. Without this, the school is a desert. For teachers and students. A factory of stupidity, hypocrisy and total emptying of the ability to imagine – this is the most necessary faculty for children and young people, but that the school, a steamroller of absurd objectives and which only aim to make new students slaves for the world of work, sees itself forced to hamper, to curtail. A school without imagination, without memory and without culture, that’s what we have almost 50 years after the 25th of April. How to explain this? The current strikes of teachers, what are they due to?
The bureaucratic crush that we teachers have been the target of, as well as the low signals that characterize, across the board, the recognition of successive governors to a professional class responsible for the training of your children and young people, that is a first explanation.
A government that does not free teachers from this dictatorship is a government of technicians of the worst kind. But there are more reasons: the freeze, for more than ten years, of a career that, according to PORDATA data, registers only 3% of young graduates interested in following the path of teaching, when, in 1996, there were around 14 % of young people following vocational training. Now, the deficient training of teachers – which results in professionals without reading done and a very poor referential universe that allows students to have a literate culture and not the instrumental and simple digital or technical competence, as well as examples of citizenship –, all of this, in addition to to the indoctrination projects issued to each new minister holding this portfolio, does not allow for the much-publicized rigor and excellence that so many like to herald. A school of rarefied air, where you live in an environment that reminds you of Huxley’s brave new world, is that what the rulers want? Will we, teachers, let this happen?
We, teachers, feel watched in our pedagogical action, since we live, with no escape, between the pidesco director, the bureaucratic network and the parents fanaticized by the deification of their children. There are admitted, but the general picture is this. It is we, the teachers, who have to do a handstand on the moon to survive, with measly pennies, the Kafkaesque process of educating in Portugal, while successive ministers launch a speech about a school that they do not know about, about a system that, logical and functional until the 90, was dismantled in the name of provincial innovations, both in terms of the placement system and in terms of programs. Who won from it? Not the teachers. Not the students. Not the country.
The education of our children and young people should be supra-partisan. Adequate curricula – and without facilities in terms of what we ask students to do – to global competitiveness, with demanding teaching of literature, arts, history, philosophy, history of ideas, and, as such, well-paid teachers, this is what would make this a intellectually and materially attractive profession. A government that does not understand the urgency of changing in this sense, whose ministers do not realize that this is vital for this country to form critical, sensitive generations, attentive to the world, is a country on the way to the bankruptcy of its future.
What do we see today? That there is no plan for Portugal to have quality senior staff. Citizens who like to live in this democracy. Except for the pilgrim idea of municipalizing education, which is to say: freeing the ME from functions that are its own and no one else’s, today everything, or almost everything, that emanates from the offices where our lives are decided reeks of indoctrination . What decisions have been taken to review the uncriticism with which teachers are evaluated? What justice is there in this teacher evaluation process, so false as it promotes envy, intrigue and persecution among colleagues? When will the full length of service be counted? Are we less, are we worth less than nurses, judges and doctors?
What discourse exists, on the part of the ME, regarding the power and respect that should be given to the teaching class so that cases of violence against teachers are not democratized to the point of absolute anarchy in schools? For when will a minister who does not endear children and adolescents and parents, infantilizing and lying, at the same time that he demonizes those who train and educate – the teachers? For everything, our revolt and our will to act are justified.
In any case, in addition to the facts listed in the previous paragraphs, there are other absolutely central problems in education in Portugal, which, responsibly, should be openly and clearly debated. The Ministry of Education, more than any other agent, must call teachers to its headquarters and, authentically, learn firsthand the disenchantment that is raging in these schools.
I will mention some other facts that, like the previous ones, are interconnected. It may be that the ME hears us. An undeniable fact is this: to the bureaucratic daily routine (“bureaucratic”, as Herberto Helder wrote) of which we are hostages, preventing us from teaching seriously, with time and knowledge, and with dignified conflicts, is added to indigence (it is the word and there is no other) from most students. How to explain that almost 50 years after April 25, our young people, for the most part, will not know how to be in school? Anyone who knows the day-to-day life of schools has to be honest: teaching today is, from the outset, knowing that the majority of students arrive at Secondary School and University without knowing how to read and write well. They know nothing about history, Portuguese and European culture, nothing about geography or foreign languages, in an almost total illiteracy. Is it a lie? Don’t we teachers complain about this reality? Because this also derives from our exhaustion, from the lack of teacher training, a class that must think about the intellectual dimension of their work. How to explain this?
The hollow ideology of the last 25 years has resulted in the following: impoverished by a tentacular apparatus of media stupidity that imposed superficiality and youth as the prerogative of what is cool, the classes are today clusters of teenagers and young adults (children too) for whom the teacher is a ridiculous figure and ridicule.
Children of hip-hop, of the brutalization of contemporary life, without language and having as their only training what the media offers, what gives them importance, in fact, to school? What is the value of taking a higher education course in this country when you know, in advance, that you want to study or not, everyone will go to the University and produce a (so-called) ‘superior’ course?
What idea of merit are we passing on to younger people?
More: Violent and immoral television promotes people without any value in Portuguese society. As Karl Jaspers wrote, TV had the honorable mission of, reaching the masses, civilizing, informing with impartiality, refusing to be a vehicle of alienation. With the exception of one case, television channels tolerate the brutalization of the country, alienating and impoverishing the Portuguese. The proof is in the recent and humiliating presence, in times of a pandemic, of tele-school teachers in one of the programs on the State channel; One of the stupidest shows we’ve had. Without models to follow, without references in the world that surrounds them, young people are left to dive into the virtual world of the diabolical social networks, the true educator of today. Not to think and act on this educational dimension is also to belittle our just and urgent struggle.
Indeed, what is this Portugal of which the school is the best mirror? It is the country of football heroes, commentators with open shirts, so-called ‘senators’ who no one understands why they are opinion makers, always polluted by the hollow ideology of the parties they represent. country that, from the Gouchas and Cristinas, to the little stars of the Portuguese music hall, should ask: how to resist the general crisis? Who’s profiting from this? We, teachers, the country’s highest education agents, must also take these issues to the public square and promote a profound debate! When, finally, does the publishing market also promote zero-grade literature, when the Humanities and the Arts are the poor relative of technical ideology, what kind of education are we actually providing? Thinking about education means thinking about culture as a whole, and, as a whole, without embarrassment, recognizing that educating is only possible with teachers, parents and rulers who are critical of alienation, the other face of totalitarian regimes.
If Paulo Freire rightly said that every teacher worthy of the name must be an agent of the indignation born of the questioning of the human condition, I add words from Mário Dionísio, inserted in O Quê? Teacher?! (Casa da Achada, Lx, 2015): «In addition to the material well-being (of its project) socialism implies an autonomous participation of workers in general and sectoral decisions, in the political conduct of the final country: not only following orders, therefore, […] but personally intervening in them. What is different from just following or refusing what is proposed to them to be chosen […]» (p.189). This is only possible with “that minimum of cultural preparation (we are not afraid of the word for the demagoguery of the moment) that allows for the in-depth recognition of the matters under debate and, above all, the critical spirit that is part of it and its consistent use. Being an explorer determines a just attitude of protest and a more than explainable desire to intervene […]» (idem, p.190).
In the article I quote, by Mário Dionísio, there is talk, at a given moment, of the legacy of fascism: a minister at the time of Salazar and Caetano also created the slogan ‘battle of education’, which had to be won. How to win, if we have reached the point where we have bastardized any ideal of education because we live in facilitating bastardization, authorized by a bureaucratized mentality?
How to win was generated, after the 25th of April, the vicious and addicted cycle of demands from the teaching class because, without a realistic purpose of fair guarantees for a class that was cultured, and self-demanding, everything comes to nothing. Because an ideal of culture must be added to indignation, read what Mário Dionísio writes on page 193 of the book I quoted. It would be good to exchange some ideas on the subject. Act, fight, but think about education as a whole and for that very reason claim European rights in this country at the corner of Europe.