Portuguese educator José Pacheco has been a leading figure in Brazilian education since the 1970s, when he founded Escola da Ponte, a model that is widely discussed and recognized around the world. For 20 years, he has been traveling between Portugal and Brazil—where he replicated the Ponte model in various projects such as Âncora and the Escola Aberta de São Paulo—and the teacher and educator continues to create, as he puts it, the “utopia” of education. And that was the central theme of his lecture, which closed the first day ofBett Brasilunder the theme “The Evolution of Education: Learning Without Classes or Tests.”

Having turned 71 this Tuesday, May 10—Pacheco was a little embarrassed when the audience broke into a rendition of “Happy Birthday” in the packed Auditorium 1—the educator continues his fight against a school model that, he says, promotes ignorance and does not respect the Constitution. And 46 years after founding Escola da Ponte, he is diving into a new project, the Open Learning School, https://oplschool.com/, which launched Portugal’s first privately run open learning school and will soon arrive in Brazil.

“I spent 54 years in public school, but I can’t be prejudiced. If public schools don’t do it, let others do it,” said Pacheco, who intends, once again, to show that “another kind of school” is possible, and shared with the congressmen a text summarizing the conclusions of a study by the OECD and UNESCO, which states that the current school model no longer works.

“Just look at the health issues among teachers and at youth suicide. Students don’t learn; they memorize, write it down, and forget it. Schools are not fulfilling what is stipulated in the Constitution—that schools must guarantee the right to education for everyone. But I ask: for everyone? More than half of young people are marginalized,” the speaker noted.

Pacheco quickly adds that he has been hearing about the education of the future for 50 years, but that this education never materializes. The Portuguese educator then says he advocates for a new social construct of learning. He goes on to list three major educational paradigms.

The first paradigm is that of instruction, “which originated in military Prussia in the 17th century and in France and England in the 19th century”; the learning paradigm, “which emerged in the early 20th century with the Escola Nova movement, in which the focus is not on the teacher but on the student, and which advocates for student autonomy—a concept that has never been put into practice except at Escola da Ponte, Projeto Âncora, and Escola Aberta in São Paulo”; and finally, there is the third paradigm, that of communication, “which stems from figures such as Paulo Freire and emphasizes the relationship between student and teacher.”

“Within these three paradigms, what we must do is create a new social construct. What is at stake today is that the center is not what the learning paradigm proposes—the student—but rather the relationship, the connection between the student and the mediator/teacher; and between them lies the object of learning, which serves to impart meaning and forge a bond, without which nothing happens. This bond is not only cognitive; it is also affective, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, and even spiritual,” stated José Pacheco, who criticized assessment systems, particularly college entrance exams such as the Enem. “Tests prove nothing,” he provocatively remarked.