The professional education as proposed by the Decree-Law nº26 of 1989 is an unprecedented and original experience, not only for Portugal but also for the rest of Europe. In the specific case of the professional artistic music education, this experience is the more exceptional.
In this sense, conducting a review of international and national literature on this topic is a difficult task, because the former is practically non-existent (European Commission, EACEA, Eurydice, 2020, e Tchernoff, 2007) and the latter, the national context, is still lacking time and research concern for its emergence. This is more apparent when taking into account the controversy and ideological resistance the implementation of this type of education and schools have generated in the field of educational policies and among the involved actors.
The agenda for a democratic society claimed by the April Revolution was still very young (the democratic revolution took place in 1974), and the memory of a society with differentiated access to education advocated by the Estado Novo was still very much present.
Despite the above-mentioned difficulties, there are, however, some essential documents, in the context of specialized music education, in general, and in professional education, in particular, that allow us to frame and shape our problematic. These are: documents as legislation, PhD thesis, articles, paper presentations and reports produced by different actors of this Portuguese educational subsystem (Abrantes, 2014; Azevedo, 1991, 1994 e 1999; Barbosa, 2006; Feliciano, 2008, Fernandes, 2007; Fernandes, 2009; Oliveira, Rodrigues, Vasconcelos,1995; Orvalho, Alves, Azevedo, 2019; Martins, 2014; Silva, 2013; Vasconcelos, 2011; Vieira, 2006).
In Portugal, with the enactment of Decree-Law nº26, of January 21 of 1989, the Professional Education and Learning System (PrELS) schools was legally created within the scope of the non-higher education system, public and private.
The PrELS gave rise to Professional Schools as alternative educational spaces to the formal education system, at the secondary level, with the aim, on the one hand, to strengthen the mechanisms of proximity and transition between school and the world of employment, local and regional, and, on the other hand, to provide young people, who do not identify themselves with the traditional high school model, with a new educational path, possibly more appealing and valued, and that will make them personally and socially fulfilled. The PrTLS are, above all, training spaces that try not to be contaminated either by the old technical school model or by the traditional high school model, both models considered, once again, to be a stigma of the professional education. It should also be stressed that the promotion of equality of access to specialized music education was also one of the essential assumptions of the creation of this model, and indeed one of the most significant points of study of this project (Sloboda, 2018).
It should be reminded that the creation of this type of education did not come about by chance or individual circumstances. It resulted, above all, from the political agenda of the ninth constitutional government (1985), concerned, on the one hand, with the essential need to modernize education as the key element to respond to the challenge of the European integration and the country’s economic and social development and, on the other to promote, for the most disadvantaged population, equal opportunities and rights in terms of schooling.
Portugal had in the eighties of the last century, a very low rate of schooling at the basic, secondary and tertiary levels of education, with high rates of school dropout and school failure. High school education appeared as the only possibility for continuing educational studies beyond the 9th year, since the past alternative paths, namely commercial and industrial education, labelled as minor and discriminatory, had been banned in 1977.
Regarding specialised artistic music education – a subsystem of public and private education peripheral to the high school system – this was of a non-mandatory nature, which, according to the prevailing discourse, was directed to individuals with specific skills, gifts or talents in music (Werner, 2007). Such a social elitism in education, aiming at a school to which only a few had access was also, at the time, a reality very close to an absolute truth.
Such a truth only begins to be contradicted after the enactment of Decree-Law nº 310 of 1983, which promoted organizational and curricular changes relevant to the democratisation of artistic education. This was followed by subsequent legislation, namely, Decree-Law nº344 of 1990 that establishes the general bases of the organisation of artistic education, and the appropriation and incorporation of the legal dispositive to establish the Professional Music Education System (PrMES).
In 1989, the first two schools of Professional Music Teaching (SPrM) in the country were created, the EPrM of Vale do Ave and the EPrM of Espinho. In the following year (1990), the Professional School of Art of Mirandela (ESPROARTE) and in 1992, the Professional and Artistic School of Alto Minho, in Viana do Castelo (ARTEAM) together with the Professional School of Arts of Beira Interior, in Covilhã (EPABI). Five years after the approval of professional music education, there were already 10 professional music schools distributed all over the country (Vasconcelos, 1995). The music education institutions, from the private and cooperative education system, received financial support from the Portuguese State and the European Community to keep their survival.
The accomplishments and the results presented by these professional music schools quickly revealed that something new and different was happening, which could change the elitist and deficient panorama of music education in Portugal.
According to the opinion of the director of the former Office of Technological, Artistic and Professional Education – GETAP, Professor Joaquim Azevedo, the novelty and difference that these professional schools involved resides in the proposed organisational, pedagogical and sociocultural model.
An organizational model that provided the schools with pedagogical, administrative and financial autonomy, and the freedom to hire its teachers and instructors. A pedagogical model that combines a solid socio-cultural component with scientific, technical and artistic training; that chooses a modular learning system, capable of sustaining the personalisation and success of the learning process; and that favours the convergence of various types of knowledge, reducing disciplinary dispersion and integrating the most practical learning into a cultural and meaning-enhancing approach. A sociocultural model that adopts the model of a smaller school (when compared to generic schools), in size and number of its actors, with a strong personalised human dimension, geographically and socially decentralised and developed by the initiative of social institutions. It functioned in cooperation with the State, under the form of program-contracts.
The assumption of this organisational, pedagogical and sociocultural model determined our main scientific domain: the sociology of organisations (Knudsen & Tsoukas, 2005), with complementary incursions in the field of the sociology of education and culture. We opt for a cultural model (Bush, 2020), concerned with the artefacts, basic values and assumptions (Schein, 2010), to understand an organisational reality that is strongly rooted in the subjectivity and intentionality of the actors involved, the social environment in which it operates and the political power that formalised it.
© Jorge Alexandre Costa & Graça Mota, 2022