If it is true that education represents the foundation for creating the generations that will shape society, then it should be a matter of collective reflection that this monopoly has been handed over to the State since primary education in Portugal.
There is a standard public system, heavily dependent on the central State, which continuously falters and has been degrading educational institutions in Portugal in three main areas:
- Organizational;
- Curricular and content-based;
- Role in the student’s life.
From an organizational standpoint, there is excessive centralization: The standard system is managed by the State. This leads to an alienation from the real interests of children and their families: The school is determined by the residential address, even if the nearest or most convenient school is private. This happens purely for ideological reasons, thereby overburdening public schools and causing issues that directly impact the quality of education (large class sizes, lack of teachers).
Defenders of an exclusively public system often reverse the concepts of “universality” and justice in this system; however, this system creates a profound inequality between students with more and fewer economic resources. Data shows that private schools consistently achieve better results in the national rankings based on performance in national exams. In 2023, the top 11 schools were private. This creates a natural segregation of students from the moment they start school.
When this issue is presented, left-wing ideologies often argue that the State should not finance private schools, and they are absolutely correct; in a market economy, the State should not intervene in private initiatives.
So, what would be the solution?
Portugal spends €100,460 per student from primary school up to the age of 15. The most effective way to combat a system that differentiates between “rich and poor” would be to directly finance this amount to the student, allowing their guardians to choose the educational institution of their convenience and preference.
Another issue that I believe is naturally important to highlight is the fact that schools do not have an active role in how they wish to operate: They do not choose their teachers, their curricula, or their ways of operating, acting in a standard and impersonal manner, according to the impositions of central authority, assuming that all regions have the same needs—“the fallacy of equality.”
Regarding content, Portuguese rulers have promoted a factory of uniform, impersonal thinking, in which the student is assessed by their ability to, like a fish, climb a tree, ignoring examples where education is decentralized and promotes methods and content that are of interest to the child.
If we look at the reality of the Nordic countries (where the management of public or private schools is indifferent), we find that there is, almost universally:
- An emphasis on Physical Education, especially through revolutionary forest kindergartens that encourage contact with nature, motor skills, and courage.
- Home economics classes;
- “Life Skills” classes to handle the challenges that life brings daily;
- The highly revolutionary appreciation of teachers in Finland.
None of this is desirable if the idea is to replace independent thought with ideology or to replace the family with the school as the main educational element, and this process, designed by Marx and Engels, has been slowly applied by the parties that have hijacked the State in Portugal.
Socialists know that it is in school that the citizens of the future are formed, and they know that to shape them according to their wishes, their individuality must be erased, the family must be alienated, and the entire educational system must, by default, be within the State.
This is not new; it was a model implemented by the Bolsheviks, cowardly forming soldiers like toy soldiers.
Education in Portugal is an urgent cause, probably the most urgent of all in the fight for freedom.