• Proposal information
• Even before the present economic crisis the share of Portuguese public expenditure allocated to education had been steadily decreasing, in what constitutes one of the few exceptions among European Countries. Conversely, if we take Higher Education (HE), the increase in the proportion of Portuguese private expenditure between 2000 and 2009 amounted to 20 percentage points, a value which was only overtaken by the corresponding one for the United Kingdom and was roughly equalized by the Slovakian situation during the same period (OECD 2012). This trend was closely followed by a severe decrease in the percentage of Portuguese HE students receiving public fellowships or grants which felt abruptly since 2009. Some critical indicators in education, as the one relative to early school leaving which had been remarkably improved between 2006 and 2009 (EC 2012), began to deteriorate  and we can’t but expect this trend to get reinforced with the newly announced government decisions concerning school organizational reform.It is therefore time to reflect on the viability of public education, now that neoliberal forces impose their burden to some Southern European countries, as Portugal, under the form of the designated financial assistance implemented by the triad IMF-EC-ECB.  To become effective, such a reflection should bring into analysis a thorough discussion under two approaches: one which seeks to systematically investigate the reasons behind the process of progressive marketization in public education even when formally democratic legal frameworks and governments are in place (Millard 1988; Lauder 1992; Husemann & Heikkinen 2004). A broader approach involves us as a social scientist who perceives that one of the main goals of public education is to deconstruct “elite knowledge” and to propose a real counter hegemonic educational program (Gramsci 1971). The exercise of critical pedagogy imposes us therefore the need to demystify clichés and to overcome reductionism and essentialism (Apple, Au & Gandin 2009) throughout which mainstream approaches have been formatting several generations of social scientists, educators and policy makers. The field of Economics of Education serves as an excellent illustration of the ability of mainstream assumptions to reproduce and provide a useful pseudo rationale in the combat towards public education. The latter has also been able to count on the important contribute which has been given by the process of subordination of social and human sciences to technical (“hard”) sciences by means of the squeezing of public research  funding directed to the former (Cole 1983; Heacock & Conte 2011).  The Portuguese evolution clearly reflects the interplay of the above trends and provides illustrative examples.

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