The salary issue has been avoided, but monetary incentives weigh most heavily in the recruitment of professors,” said researcher Pedro Freitas of Universidade Nova yesterday at the first PSD Interparliamentary Assembly in the Azores, in the case of Ponta Delgada.
In this meeting, where several areas with important reflexes at the regional level were discussed, Education was one of them.
Concerning the estimated shortage of more than 34 thousand teachers in the next ten years, which will also affect the archipelago, Pedro Freitas recalls that “the early career as a teacher is poorly paid, with a very slow evolution” and includes people who many fields have been educated and who have promising careers in the private sector. That will explain the “drunk drop of graduates” in the field of education.
This researcher, who spoke to social democratic MEPs, members of the regional government and regional deputies from the Azores and the Assembly of the Republic, also expressed himself as “shocked” by the “apathy” with which Portugal is dealing with the consequences of the pandemic while learning. He even stressed that there is no knowledge of how the 900 million euro recovery plan is being implemented.
The studies, he said, show that students from lower-income families are most disadvantaged by the impact of the pandemic, as are students with lower school results. An inequality that, despite the recognition that Portugal has developed a lot in terms of results, cannot be overcome.
PSD Vice President and MEP Paulo Rangel took advantage of his experience as a teacher, more than 30 years ago, in higher education to say: “Today I have better students in quantity, but the average is frankly worse. More unequal and a very well-prepared elite”. And he criticized the “very low accuracy of the content”.
Pedro Freitas regarded this discrepancy as “normal” as there is a much higher level of access to higher education”, but admitted that there is still a “huge inequality” in access to this level of education.
Source: DN
