Education in Portugal - My Personal Opinion

Hello Steemians,

Yesterday at dinner with my parents we started a debate about education in Portugal due to a non related theme.

Particularly i consider that my years of secundary school/Highschool were badly harnessed and that they could be more empowering in order to prepare better, for what is expected from us…

I can enumerate several reasons ( perhaps personal one's..) for this, that I write below:

Photo from Pixabay.com

• Lack of Motivation (Lack of focus) – I consider that this is one of the core points. The fact of placing around 20 to 30 students in a classroom directed by only one teacher, is for me the main reason that led me to lack of motivation for learning. I think it is impossible to manage 30 persons in such a way, that all of them reach the proposed objectives, and that they really learn something instead of the traditional copy-> paste that we are evaluated and rewarded.
  

Photo from pixabay.com

-Education program is badly structured/old fashioned – Regarding this point, only later, after completing high school, i noticed that looking back, a lot of information that had been presented to me, was in fact useless for the present days or what was yet to come.

Obviously there is a lot of the information taught, that I consider important, but perhaps we should give opportunity to other themes that are present and around us every single day, and that we know nothing about them, and this would also be extremely useful for us in the future.

Some themes that I find today extremely difficult or that I notice it on other people of the same age as me are:

• - Finance – Everyone needs to know how to deal with Money in order to be able to play in the society we live on, and we know little or nothing about Money, taxes, Indenpendet worker’s receipts, cash-flow’s, negotiation , etc..

• -Electricity and Tecnhology – We all have eletrical appliances in our houses such as televisions, toasters, radios or machines that transports us or produce something. What do we know about them? We know that they have a plug, with two poles (or more) and that they connect to a wall socket, have a on/off button and nothing more. For something that is so present in our life’s, maybe we should learn a little bit more about it…

• -To be given the option of choosing what themes interests us more, trough trial periods.

That is, what I intend to say is that there are other themes, more modern or that interest us more than those that are presented to us ( Don’t even get me started about the interests behind all this..) and that in such an important stage, as a youngman “must decide” what interests him/her more, I think that the themes/contents could be more wide ranged, and also practice more the philosophy of learning by doing ( Which again is impossible while managing 30 persons).

-An education which is a Castrator of creativity- The way as knowledge is faced today is very skeptic. I give you the exemple of the Gravity Constant. I know that it is a specific exemple, but for those who don’t know, universal constant’s are based in multiple measurements and results, where after you make a mean (Constant) and then it becomes universal.

This is, we all know that Mr. Newton observed the force of gravity by observing the fall of the apple, but do we all know that gravity has different force in different places of the earth? I don’t know in fact if this can influence anything, but one of the rules of the scientific method is based on the observation of sistematical events, if this does not happen, why base ourselves in constants , just because it is easier for everyone? Does this makes sense? Should we base ourselves in the changes of gravity force?

At least i felt many times , by some teachers, the answers of it is ‘cause it is because it ever was like this..lol

What i mean is that, “things” are in such a way , until there is someone that rebels against it and changes totally our knowledge about that “thing”. Many times i did and saw someone doing “thing” trough a different way with the same final result, only to hear someone say that it is not the right way to do it. After all there are many roads that lead to Rome, right?

Personally i suffer a little bit when there is a discussion about this theme, I assume that there are more people that felt the same way as I did. Luckily I think that kid’s today will beat us so bad in terms of knowledge and know-how when they reach our age, because they didn’t take the technology transition that we had to cross, and they have more and more access to information much more precise and detailed regarding any theme

Tell me your opinions, what should we improve our develop in Portugal education?

Do you think that our development could have been empowered??

Peace!

@jskronos