Abstract:

This paper aims to interrogate the specificity of the development of mass schooling in southern European countries, based upon the Portuguese “case", that is quite singular within the European context. In fact, basic education become compulsory in Portugal in the middle of XIX century but most Portuguese citizens remained illiterate until the middle of XX century and the levels of schooling in all educational subsystem remained quite bellow the European average, until the transition to XXI century (Candelas, 2007). Nowadays the situation is rather different and current research shows the educational landscape is increasingly close to European benchmarks: levels of preschool attendance, rate of low achievers in reading and math, early school leaving, percentage of graduates in math and science, development of lifelong learning and higher education (Dias, 2013, 2014). Educational policies and political agenda are also strongly influenced by European guidelines and discourse (Alves, 2010). However; these changes did not prevent the country of continuing to have very weak levels of social mobility and equity in education.

In order to analyze the complexity of Portuguese situation this study took into consideration different sources of data: Portuguese legislation, European guidelines in the field of education and training; national and international educational statistics; evolution of Portuguese position in PISA. The data shows that both internal and external factors are accountable for the rapid development of the Portuguese Education in the last decades and that the changes were both of a quantitative and qualitative nature. Higher education became central to youth life changes but is not, yet, a real challenge to the very traditional patterns of social mobility that have been a persistent feature of Portuguese society.

References:
[1] Alves ; M (2010) Aprendizagem ao longo da vida e políticas educativas europeias, Caparica : Universidade Nova de Lisboa
[2] Candeias, A (2007) Educação , Estado e Mercado : Porto , Afrontamento
[3] Dias. M (2013), Education and Equality in Portugal: The Role of Priority Education Policies. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences., Vol 8, 132- 14 3
[4] Dias, M. (2014). The impact of Lisbon’s strategy on the patterns of education and training in Portugal* Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 116 (21) 1885-1889

Keywords:

Mass Education.