A few dozen students gathered this Friday at Alameda D. Afonso Henriques, in Lisbon, recovering slogans from 50 years ago and demanding more practical classes, other forms of assessment and greater attention to mental health.
Holding posters with messages from April 74, the students – mostly art students from Liceu Camões and Secundária António Arroio, but also Marquesa de Alorna and Gil Vicente, and some elementary school children – shouted slogans and They sang “Grândola, Vila Morena”, by Zeca Afonso, and “E Além do Adeus”, by Paulo de Carvalho, several times.
To Lusa, João Jesus, a student at Liceu Camões, explained that young people came together to “claim their rights”, remembering that students “need to have enough space to show their strength”, together with assistants and teachers, as “every member of the school makes a difference and wants more visibility.”
In the manifesto he held in his hand, João Jesus defended “greater visibility in schools, greater visibility of education in the Government, mainly because the State Budget for culture is ridiculous” and “schools that have more artistic intervention” are needed.
“We want schools that are more alive. We want the abolition of exams in a certain way. We want more practical classes, we want to be more in touch with the future and the manifesto is not just to talk about our demands, but to talk about our future, because the 25th of April is not over yet”, explained the 17-year-old.
The initiative, which was born in a class at Liceu Camões, grew with the association of the National Arts Plan (PNA), which extended the invitation to the 510 school groups/non-grouped schools in its national network. Together, a program was prepared with exhibitions, shows and debates, also with the support of the Commemorative Committee for the 50th anniversary of April 1974.
All the actions, which began about a year ago, according to Sara Brighenti, deputy commissioner of the PNA, culminated this Friday with the appeal “All to Manif”, “with many schools across the country taking to the streets and students to present their demands.”
“We made a call to these schools in the various cities to demonstrate, bringing not only the principles of April, freedom of expression and all freedoms, but also the major issues that move young people, in the call for a differentiated and more connected with the contemporary world”, he explained.
Sara Brighenti summarized the young people’s demands to Lusa as “a great desire to connect learning to life”, and recognized that young people like school, “but they need one that gives them content, that makes them more participatory, that can understand the world to choose higher education”.
According to the deputy commissioner, another of the students’ biggest issues “is the non-hierarchization of subjects, that is, a more transdisciplinary teaching, where the arts are as important as science, technology, and the humanities – for them, it doesn’t make sense this division.”
These young people also raise awareness about the issue of mental health, said Sara Brighenti, remembering that there is “a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress caused by exams”.
“We have to think that when they look at life and the future they see it in a more blurred way. The pressure is all on this generation, which has created many mental health issues, and they are explicit, they are not ashamed to say so – that new ways of evaluating be thought of, that are not just tests or exams, that more creative ways of doing it be found”.
Matei Cascavel, 17 years old, explained that he was demonstrating this Friday to “have a future as an artist, to see if Portugal continues to give a boost to art, to culture, to try to avoid having to emigrate in the future” .
The student recognized that many of the younger artists leave Portugal “not because of the country’s disgust, but because of the lack of opportunities”. Young people, he stressed, are “definitely the future of the country and they are the ones who have to bring these demonstrations to the streets.”
Mariana Pinho is also a nonconformist young woman in her 17th year and agrees with her colleague from Liceu Camões, recognizing that “many artists emigrate because in Portugal there is no stability in this type of profession, especially those who want to pursue theater”.
“We are fighting for a very important role here, because we are in April, the month of revolutions and change. Nowadays the truth is that the arts are very minimized and given very little credibility, there is much more of a stage for science courses and this is also seen in job opportunities”, he stressed.
