School in Norway

People from Portugal have been asking me about this topic and also some Norwegians have been wondering how school here differs from the one I attend in Portugal.

Education is a constant subject of discussion in Portugal and I think there are some ideas from the Norwegian system that definitely worth being tried. Some of them are impossible to implement in a moment that we are handling a lot of pressure to reduce the costs of the Public Sector. Others, that have more to do with values, are urgent and I don’t find anything against them.

In Norwegian, the same word (lærer) means both “teach” and “learn”. Indeed, teachers aren’t afraid to hear opinions that differ from the ones they had in the first place. I’ve been asked a couple of things about Portugal. In each subject this questions differ. In Social Economics (Samfunnsøkonomi), for instance the teacher inquired about Portuguese situation and I was able to discuss about it. The thing is, there aren’t owners of the reason and in general (although I also have met great teachers in Portugal) here I see more receptiveness to disagreement and therefore, the classroom is a place where everybody can learn.

Another thing that extends to other sectors of the society is that formality doesn’t mean respect. In Portugal we insist on the formality. Here, in classes, you can eat, you treat a teacher by his first name, you can take your shoes off and at the same time the teacher gets respect, no one dares to speak, homework are always done… Usually the attempts to bring a bit less informality to Portugal aren’t taken very seriously. I remember when this Government took power, the Economy Minister asked to be called by his first name and they managed to evoke some law saying that Ministers must refer to each other as Sir Minister.

The ICT’s are the future. The ones that don’t agree with that are still drawing in walls instead of reading this. It’s impossible to give a laptop to each student as it’s done in Norway due to the reason I’ve already told. Even though this, there are tools that we can use. The movies are one of them. In less than one month I’ve already seen at least five movies, most of them in Sociology (Sosiologi og sosialantropologi) and English (International Engelsk) classes. I’ve already wrote about this but the online platforms are also a way to get to students when they are spending several hours in front of PCs.

In Portugal, we are still insisting in memorizing skills (I don’t disagree that these should be worked when students are younger) whereas here people have already realized that it’s more important that students are giving the independence to find, select and resume the information. So, if someone knows Nuno Crato (Portuguese Education Minister), please e-mail him the link of this blog.

I’m writing this for you so I would like to hear if you think that I should change something on the way I approach issues, on the way I write, on what I write about…