Chemistry

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In June 2011, Portugal was coming to grips with the most serious financial crisis of its recent history. The state was broken and unable to adopt the common short- term solutions for monetarily independent countries. The country had joined the euro 12 years earlier and the state was unable to finance its debt. In May 2011, a bailout had been agreed with the IMF and the EC, and the government had fallen. Elections were held and a new prime minister had been appointed: the social democrat Pedro Passos Coelho. I was in Berlin at a stopover for a conference trip when I received a phone call and an invitation to join the government.

I am not a politician and did not join any party, but my strong educational convictions were well known by the new prime minister. I barely knew him, but he gave me total support for the reforms I had been preaching for years through books, opinion articles, and press interviews. These reforms are easy to enumerate: a strong, demanding, and well-structured knowledge-based curriculum, frequent student evaluation, rigorous initial teacher training, school autonomy, support for failing students, vocational paths, and results-based school incentives. In a practical way, they were a continuation and acceleration of Portugal’s progress in education. But in the discourse, they were a paradigm shift from a competences-based and a student-centred education, to a knowledge-based, more direct teaching approach.” Research ED.