The biggest Portuguese problem

Is the extreme low quality of the educational system.

In the last 30 years, the greatest achievement of the democratic system in Portugal was to democratize education and to give the basic formal skills to most of the population. An extremely worthy achievement, one the country should be very proud of. But one huge problem remains to be solved: the quality of the education that is provided to all.

A simple example, which I think of often and that lead me to this conclusion of the failure of the educational system in providing quality education for those that go through it, is the following: most of the skills and knowledge that I acquired and that I use in my professional life (even as an individual seeking his way through the complexity of today's world) were not acquired at school, by which I mean the first 12 years of education. I did get a basic package of skills, like reading, writing and counting, but that was all that those 12 years of school managed to give me. Two of the most important things in life were never considered and taught: the importance of hard work and of using your brain. Repetition and passing exams was the main pedagogical tactic of the system, not forming people that were able to seek answers for themselves (more precisely, the development of a critical mind). School was not demanding and as such it become boring, unchallenging, and as a consequence useless. This is our drama as a nation, to form our people to a high enough standard so that they become critical minds: putting it simply, not a school that produces brains full of content but which in the end is useless, since students are unable to think and to use this content in a creative and critical fashion; instead a school that produces brains that leave school with (maybe) a bit less of content in them but with considerably more skill in finding and critically going through new information and knowledge, therefore being able to create new ideas and thoughts from the information they gather and collect.

For me, the biggest example of the failure of our educational system is the visible incompetence of our politicians, like Socrates and Passos Coelho: people that are clearly technically unprepared (verging on the incompetent most of the time), void of independent thought and novel reasoning regarding the issues that they are faced with, and whose only attribute is a vacuous ability to speak and lead people who are as uncritical as they are.

Lord help us!!

PS: Of course, there are many more problems, such as the "Doctor" mentally and the lack of practical skills and medium technical skills. Probably more on that soon...