From the Invention of the Democratic City to the Management of Exclusion and Urban Violence in Portugal

The educational policies implemented in Portugal over the last three decades can be understood only in the light of this country’s backwardness in this field, as compared with other European countries. Even though the indicators provided by these investigations are open to discussion, Portugal belongs to the countries of the European Union whose average performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys is the poorest, these results being counterbalanced by the fact that the variation and the inequalities between pupils or schools are lower there than their median value in all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Hence there is the twin political objective of raising the level of education and improving the conditions of learning and teaching for the whole of the population on the one hand, and fighting against educational failure on the other, this second objective giving rise to the implementation of structural efforts and measures aiming at creating the conditions for preventing lasting exclusion, and also at reaching the pupils or young adults already suffering from exclusion. It is this interweaving of different objectives, themselves in the process of change, for which the authors of this chapter1 would like to provide better understanding.