NewsLab

The most popular video these past few days in Portugal was this one:

You don’t need to understand Portuguese to figure what’s happening here. A teenage student fights her teacher over her mobile phone in a classroom, during a French class. Her classmates, not only do NOT interfere in the dispute – during its first minutes –, but also record it with a mobile camera. This video shows what has been going on for years in Portugal but people never really saw. Indiscipline and violence, towards the teachers and other students, was made visible. It was a shock. Suddenly, people realized that something was very wrong in portuguese schools. I don’t know what went wrong somewhere in the last 10/15 years. Portugal continues to be at the bottom of the European list in terms of education and scholarship. What I do know is that if we keep it like this, Portuguese students will NOT be the men and women of tomorrow in this globalized, competitive and success oriented marketplace we find ourselves in. They will probably end up being the excluded people of tomorrow.