Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

Attitude of the People.

Education in Portugal is of three kinds: primary, secondary (in lycées, in the capital of each district, with two at Oporto and three at Lisbon), and the University education of Coimbra. Primary education has been compulsory for the last generation, yet four and a half million out of six million inhabitants cannot write or read. There is indeed little inducement for the peasants to send their children to school, and considerable inducement to keep them at home where they can be useful in the fields. In a land of few industries, where a large majority of the inhabitants live by agriculture and fishing, there is but little need of book-learning, nor is there any universal book to be found in peasants’ houses, as the Bible in England. Moreover, the peasants distrust education, and distrust it the more the more it is mixed up with politics and questions of religion. And if illiterates are disfranchised they look upon that rather as a blessing than a penalty, being desirous to have as little to do with politics as may be. Some of the children are quite keen to learn, and after being kept at work all day willingly attend night classes; but there is many a family in which the parents not only do not encourage their children to learn to write and read, but deliberately forbid it, considering that the drawbacks of education exceed its advantages. The Republic is credited with the project of providing all the children at the primary schools with food and clothes. It may be wondered what the ill-paid schoolmasters would say to this—probably they would go on strike until they were given clothes and food too—but the children would certainly flock to school, as indeed they often do now, without therefore necessarily learning to write or read. Para que serve saber ler? What use is it? That is the question which the peasant children learn from their parents, who, it is to be feared, do not pay all the respect that were to be desired to Lisbon’s crowding politicians. Perhaps, too, in their native good sense, they consider the pale and sickly Lisbon school children who on the shortest provocation will rattle you off a fable of La Fontaine in French or talk of the eclipses or the equinox, or the scientific reason for the colour of sunsets, or other high matters of which you know nothing and which to them are mere abstractions, while they do not know the difference between an ash and an oak. Of Portuguese as it should be spoken, of Portuguese literature, history and geography they are more ignorant. Yet before learning French or English they should surely be taught Portuguese—the direct and forcible Portuguese of the early prose-writers.

Aged Children.

In Portugal, and especially in the towns, the children are for the most part too serious and precocious and sad. This seems to be encouraged; they are willingly taken to funerals or marshalled in thousands to attend political demonstrations. It was even proposed recently, on the occasion of the death-sentence in the English law-courts of a Portuguese who had murdered his wife, that all the school-children, pompously lectured on the duties of humanity, should sign a petition to the King of England on his behalf. Thus they are doctors at ten—docteurs à dix [ans]—in Montaigne’s phrase and die of old age before they are twenty.

The Lycées.

The theoretical character of the education provided is especially noticeable in the lycées. This ensino secundario is described by a master in July, 1913, as consisting of “immense disconnected programmes.” It overloads the pupil’s mind, and stuffs him with abstractions. Far from diminishing, it increases his natural vagueness and teaches him to approach Portugal by way of China or Japan and mankind through that wicked abstraction, Humanity. Freedom and Happiness, too, fade away into abstract ideals to be intrigued and fought for, perhaps, but scarcely to be enjoyed in common life. Yet it is as true now as when Blake wrote the words that “Those who want Happiness must stoop [not soar] to find it: it is a flower that grows in every vale.” It is as true now, in spite of all the changed conditions, as when Goethe said it, that “If a man has enough Freedom to live a healthy life and carry on his work, it should suffice him, and so much freedom anyone can easily attain.” The number of those who matriculated at the lycées throughout the country is given for 1907-8 as 6,947, including 1,845 at the three Lisbon lycées, 802 at the two Oporto lycées, 630 at Coimbra, 343 at Braga, 310 at Vizeu, 181 at Evora.[33]

University Degrees.

The University of Coimbra has the advantage of attracting scholars from all Portugal and of thus being Portugal’s factory of ideas and future politicians. The practical object of the undergraduates is to become lawyers, journalists, politicians, Government officials. To be addressed for the rest of their lives as Senhor Doutor (bacharel, licenciado, doutor) appeals to their vanity.

The Liberal Profession.

The result is that all these liberal professions are overcrowded and so unremunerative that it is necessary for one person to combine two or three professions; to be for instance, journalist, advocate, and leader of a party, or journalist, doctor, and Minister of Finance. The number of applicants for every post makes it possible, moreover, for the Government to leave the officials unpaid: others will be only too willing to succeed them should they rebel. Every Government department, and indeed every liberal profession, is overstaffed. “In nearly every service there is an army of supernumeraries, many of whom merely receive a salary without doing any work, the public department to which they belong not even knowing their address. Yet when a post becomes vacant a new official is appointed, the supernumeraries continuing as before” (O Seculo, 7th December, 1912). The first years after a revolution were unlikely to bring any change: “Republican Ministers seem to have considered matters of administration too insignificant to notice.... New expenses have been created, the action of the public departments extended with lamentable rapidity, and no check has been set, as was urgently required, on the system of promotions and the growth of the bureaucracy” (O Seculo, 3rd December, 1912).