In the same week that Portugal discussed a motion of censure in parliament, the PISA results were published, revealing a significant setback in Portuguese education. Students read worse today than in 2000, and in mathematics they regressed to 2003 levels. After a peak in 2015, when the OECD considered Portugal a success story, results have been falling consistently, erasing twenty years of progress and translating into more than one year of schooling lost.
The article points out that the far-right presents no proposals for public education, suggesting that the same economy of screens, networks, and algorithms that helps explain the educational decline is also the terrain where this political force thrives. Those who benefit from distraction have no incentive to combat it.
A former executive director of the PISA program is criticized for attributing poor performance exclusively to global trends and mobile phone use, which the article considers not to be genuine reflection, but rather a circumstantial mea culpa.
The text also directs criticism at the PS, arguing that the party does not reflect on its mistakes and that the educational decline began in 2015, coinciding with a decade in which the minimum deficit became a priority and public investment was reduced to the bare minimum. The article concludes that the country needs to stop and reflect on the path it is taking and on what it can no longer postpone.
