Education today: What is the future of Portugal?
It is important not to lose sight of the fundamental thing: the education of our children and adolescents. Future adults, future business and political cadres, men and women from commerce and from many other sectors; cultural agents, doctors, engineers, architects; children and adolescents, young adults, themselves, one day, fathers and mothers. Many, perhaps, future teachers. In this central debate of our community life, and after demonstrations, negotiation rounds between unions, Minister João Costa and his team, it is with some perplexity that he asks me (as we all ask ourselves) why, when we talk about education, we are always for the same formal issues, as if those of content did not exist.
If, as is fair, reversing career progression, putting an end to the quota system, stabilizing the teaching profession at the level of the placement regime and reducing bureaucracy in school daily life (including administrative services!) are measures that cannot be postponed, it is urgent , in this debate, reflect on the future of education in Portugal. Deep down, doing what we eagerly do: designing, with solid and realistic ideas and ideas, a country where living is not (as it is today, again) the salazarenga “sadness content”, with no money but for shopping to fill your stomach, no future expectations. It is easy to attack, at this moment, who has to decide and put in motion an action plan that aims to meet some demands of the teaching class. Trade unions and other educational agents – which include large sectors of civil society and, of course, the authorities – must unite and concentrate, despite fair complaints, on one single goal: what country are we building, what functions are we, in fact, providing to our children and adolescents, to our university students?
In this article, I point out some facts and propose some ideas (ideal, certainly) that, I believe, could be developed, as long as competent people are chosen. It is with this government that one must know how to negotiate. Extreme positions are not admissible when, at the limit, thinking about education implies being aware that it is about protecting the democracy in question. Democracy and freedoms at a time when totalitarianisms surround it. Given the extreme positions of those who manifest themselves, it is legitimate to ask whether we, teachers, would like to come to negotiate with parties of the Extreme Right, whose only program is to destroy public schools and democracy itself to serve oligarchies of various kinds. Being a teacher today, as in all times, requires a profound vision of the times in which we live. I will leave, for parents and teachers, brief indications of books that, accessible in any bookstore, could be read by all educational agents. The school, the guardianship, the teachers, the students, we should all think of an education in Portugal that had as its sole aim something simple and true: education is a human project that liberates from obscurantism and its purpose is to make life, this brief time in that we are together, happier. Culture is the only main journey of the School, it is not the labor market that, made up of people devoid of ideals and ideas, moves and dynamizes a meaningful society.
1) TEACHER TRAINING. There has not been, in the last fifteen years, appreciably, teacher training at the level of didactics and pedagogy in numerous disciplines. There is an immense lack of culture in the teaching profession regarding “how to do” and “what to do” so that classes are not the desert that many students rightly complain about. The pedagogical ones, with a methodologist and supervisor in the field, and the respective classes attended, were replaced by a blanket of flaws that translate into a lack of responsibility on the part of the teacher in the classroom. Without fair remuneration, displaced from his area of residence, far from his family, the lack of motivation and interest in what it means to be a teacher becomes more acute.
Without reference bibliography, presentation of a written test, reflecting on the classes taught in two groups (it was like that in the past), those who choose the Teaching-way today do nothing more than learn some commonplaces about the teaching-learning process. Dear colleagues, here is, for those who want to go against the tide, a text on how to be a teacher, very up-to-date due to the criticisms and solutions it presents: “A Educação do Sentimento Poético”, thesis for admission to teaching practice, by Jacinto do Prado Coelho ( Lello editors, 1994, 1st ed.1944).
2) THE INDISCIPLINE OF THE STUDENTS: Everyone, guardians, directors of schools, universities; families, companies – let’s hear that there is a general lack of education in Portuguese society. I dare say that insensitivity and rudeness (Camões already condemned this reality in the 16th century) is transversal to all generations, but is especially serious in the younger ones. “Young people talk badly,” says one. “They are violent,” replies another. “They only want to know about cell phones, iPhones, tablets”, a third party found. “They don’t study”, says a mother, between giving up and impotence. An urgent measure to be taken – here the Ministry of Education must seriously reflect on the place of the School in a digitized, but brutalized – and unpopular society (but which a media campaign – TV, above all – could boost), would be this: banning cell phones and other media devices in educational establishments. Harms are protected (obesity, loss of socio-cognitive faculties, memory loss, cardio-vascular problems, hyper-active students; sleep problems, with diverse and serious neuronal consequences, ankylosing of the will, atrophy of the imagination and the competence of the writing, impoverishment of language) of digital ideology, which standardizes everything under the capacity for effectiveness.
Turned into employees, digital sponsored teachers actually pretend to be people who function but don’t think? Let them read, therefore, The Factory of Digital Cretinsby Michel Desmurget (Counterpoint, 2020) and, by Nicholas Carr, Superficials – what the internet is doing to our brains, Gradiva, 2012). Added to this is the clear fact: many teachers were already educated in the formatting system of the last 20 years. Classes suffer from a lack of critical thinking on the part of those who teach.
3) A BOOK CAMPAIGN AT SCHOOL AND LITERATURE: It is urgent, in Schools and University, that, in addition to the excellent work of dynamization that many teacher-librarians do, there is a media campaign (TV in particular is called to this fight) around the presence of the book. I am not repugnant to the idea – as long as it is guided by competent people, who know what it means to talk about books and literature – of publicity for the magic of books and reading; this campaign was carried out by actors, athletes, writers (not only those in fashion, as it is also necessary to make new values known), politicians. School syllabus books, by the way: medieval poets, Fernão Lopes, Gil Vicente, Garrett, Antero, here are some authors mistreated because they were never read. A precious aid for us to see how to seduce to a reading would be to show, in the classes, documentaries (which there are!), didactically and soberly presented by great communicators of Portuguese television.
Literature, moreover, so diluted today, should be the anchor discipline of students’ training: it moves affections, educates about values, raises awareness of the aesthetics of the language, broadens what is recommended, puts us face to face with the great human dramas , is the bridge to possible worlds. History, Philosophy, Mentalities, Geography, Sciences, it is in Literature that we find this knowledge. Book? By Vitor Manuel de Aguiar e Silva, The Humanities, Cultural Studies, Literature Teaching and Portuguese Language PolicyAlmedina, Coimbra, 2010.
Teachers, parents, Prime Minister and Minister of Education: without books, without History, without Arts, without Literature, without educated children and teenagers, without teachers who are, Portugal will be nothing but the encouraged terrain of the usual atavisms, soulless country, mere “wisp”, given over to football, stupidity and the dictatorship of banality. Another form of dictatorship.
Professor, poet and literary critic