Colloquium Education and Social Change in Times of Revolutionary Transition

The year 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution. It was not only a landmark event for the Portuguese people, as it put an end to 48 years of dictatorship, but also one with global implications, as it became the epicentre of the genesis of a third wave of democratisation that substantially altered the world's political map.

"The third wave of democratisation in the modern world began, implausibly and involuntarily, at twenty-five minutes past midnight on Thursday, April 25, 1974, in Lisbon, Portugal, when a radio station played the song Grândola Vila Morena," wrote the American political scientist Samuel Huntington in his famous work The Third Wave. Democratisation in the Late Twentieth Century (1991). The Portuguese Revolution began as a coup d'état led by young officers organised in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), who saw no way out of a war being fought in the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

But it quickly turned into a social revolution, the result of an alliance between the People and the MFA, building what Robert Fishman (2019) calls a "post-revolutionary democracy", whose differentiating and transgressive element was a radically democratic practice in relation to other later democratic transition processes. If, on a global level, the rupture that began with 25 April 1974 paved the way for the "third wave" of democratisation in the modern world, on a national level it meant overcoming the double crisis of legitimacy and hegemony that Portuguese society had been experiencing since the 1960s.

The social mobilisation made possible by the Revolution led to giant steps being taken in the affirmation of citizenship rights. This resulted in the construction of a welfare state that, although incipient when compared to the states of northern and central Europe, changed the social condition of the Portuguese.

In the field of education policies, the Revolution gave a new centrality to educational issues, remobilising aspirations for access to different levels of schooling, amplified by Veiga Simão's meritocratic discourse in the early 1970s, and opening up new fronts in terms of participation in school management and the reformulation of educational structures and content.

In the period of revolutionary crisis, as well as being the scene of heated political struggles, education became a privileged ground for legitimising the new democratic situation, seeking to show (not just in terms of discourse) a radical change from the previous obscurantist policies of the Estado Novo. If, in the first moments after the military movement, the idea was to give continuity to the "educational reform" outlined by Veiga Simão in the last government of the dictatorship (1971-1974), it wasn't long before steps were taken to try to draw up a programme that, in the field of education, responded to the objective, then widely consensual in political discourse, of building a "society on the road to socialism", to use the expression enshrined in the first Constitution of the Republic, of April 1976.

Alberto Melo, in a text from 1979, summarised the revolutionary process well: "Portugal then experienced one of those periods that are so rare in the life of all societies, a period in which everything seems possible and within everyone's reach, everything else has become achievable and everyone has rushed to solve the traditional sufferings of the Portuguese population once and for all".

It is against this backdrop that the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Education and Development (CeiED), of Lusófona University, and the History of Education Association of Portugal (HISTEDUP) are organising the Colloquium The utopias of the April revolution. Education and social change in times of revolutionary transition (1974-1976).

Programme

29th April

10h00 - Reception for participants

11h00 - Opening Session

• António Teodoro, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Education and Development (CeiED), Lusófona University
• Carla Vilhena, President of HISTEDUP, University of the Algarve
• José Bragança Miranda, Rector of Lusófona University

11h00 - Opening Speeches Revolution, Counterrevolution and Memory.

• António de Spínola
• Francisco Bairrão Ruivo, Institute of Contemporary History, New University of Lisbon

13h00 - Lunch break

14h30 - Round table 1 - Schools go to the streets and the streets go to the schools - Roadmap of pedagogical innovations Methodological indications: Interrogations, abandonments, continuities.

• Raquel Pereira Henriques, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon
• Luís Mota, School of Education, Polytechnic of Coimbra
• António Gomes Ferreira, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Coimbra
• Carla Vilhena, University of the Algarve
• Rui Grácio, Pioneer of pedagogical innovation in the Transition and the Revolution
• Joaquim Pintassilgo, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon

Moderator: Justino Magalhães, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon

16h00 - Coffee break

16h30 - Round table 2 - Power to teachers and schools: trade unionism, democratic management and teacher identities in the revolutionary transition

• António Teodoro, Lusófona University
• Licínio C. Lima, University of Minho
• Amélia Lopes, University of Porto

Moderator: Ana Patrícia Almeida, Universidade Aberta

18h00 - Closing session

30th April
 

09h30 - Communications

11h00 - Coffee break

11h30 - Round table 2 - Democratisation and Sports Culture

• José Baeta Sequeira da Silva, Professor of Physical Education
• Manuel Brito, President of the Portuguese Anti-Doping Authority
• Jorge Proença, Lusófona University

Moderator: José V. Brás, Lusófona University

13h00 - Lunch break

14h30 - Round Table 3 - Popular Power and Emancipation.

• Maria João Mogarro, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon
• Pierre Marie, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra
• Luísa Tiago Oliveira, ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon

Moderator: Teresa Teixeira Lopo, Lusófona University

16h00 - Coffee break

16h30 - 50 years on, was it worth it?

• Colonel Vasco Lourenço Member of the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) and of the Council of the Revolution, Chairman of the Board of the 25 April Association

17.30: Closing ceremony