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Life is made of perceptions of the Universe. How to
explain colour to the eye-less starfish? How to explain
music to the ear-less worm? How to explain a perfume to a
nose-less bacteria?
How to enlighten someone who has been attached to a
narrow-minded and superficial perception of the world?
The gifted, living in a world of narrow-minded, can
rarely or never be understood by the latter because these
lack the organs and the reason that grant them perception or
understanding.
Thus, for the Portuguese, the role of education is
essential. Education is not just knowing more, seeing more
and perceiving more: it is to ascend in the scale of
complexity of understanding. It is as if we had weakened
organs that only continued exercise can help develop - one
of those organs is intelligence.
The difficulty in reorganizing education by decree lies
in the existence of people. If they were machines, we would
programme them and they would obey with deviations only
inside the specified margins of tolerance.
But they are people, they have interests, emotions, fears
and perceptions.
Sometimes they lack enough understanding, though. It is,
however, hard to explain to those who are (de)formed by
ideological paradigms that only a blind man (a bacteria? A
starfish?) wouldn’t acknowledge those to have resulted in a
huge failure, that the central basis of education in
Portugal is management and not pedagogy.
Today, changing the education is changing management.
There is an immense and dense science about organisations
and planning of production, about the management of means
and resources, planning by objectives, control of production
and process, who knows what more…We can’t really say much
has been done in favour of an efficient organisation and
management of the educational sector.
In high-school we saw the resistance and the complaints
regarding the issue of substitute classes and we observe
how, in fact, many teachers were suddenly very unhappy. But
the question is: is it an evil of the concept or of the
incompetence of the management of many schools that couldn’t
or didn’t know how to reorganize their own concept of
management to satisfy the requirements the society generally
perceives as correct?
In the University, we see that there is a growing
disparity between well-run and ill-run schools, between
institutions that aim to serve the citizens and others that
maintain the logic that citizens are the ones who have to
serve it. For those seeking for examples, here they are:
while we have Faculties where you can pay the fees online,
check timetables, enroll, collect powerpoints given by the
teachers, be enlightened in relation to a given subject,
collect the pedagogic material given in each class,
everything through the internet, there are others in which
life drags slowly through the sacred institution which is
paper and lines for the administrative services.
Another example is: how is it possible that there is a
school where disabled students that have to move in
wheelchairs, can’t go to a bar because the only access to it
is stairs? Or, in a more inflamed way: how is it possible
that none of us has noticed it and presented a solution? And
here’s an explanation: because we absorb, by osmosis, the
culture of resignation to the inevitable – when it is not,
it is only up to us.
Serving citizens is two things: being there for them in
time of need and making their life easier. But we can’t keep
supporting the ancient culture of the blackmail of the State
that explained the citizens that “in order to have a
service, you have to suffer and still, be thankful”.
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