An approach to the analysis of the high-school teaching system in Portugal

I. Composition of the schooled population in the official high-school teaching

Abstract

This study, from which only the first part is published in this number of Análise Social, is an introduction to the analysis of the results from an inquiry through questionnaire done in June 1975 to a certain number of high-school pupils from official schools in the region of Lisbon. It intends to give a general sight where one may detach some basic characteristics of the Portuguese secondary teaching system in the 1974-1975 school year (which was crucial in the evolution of that system), specially concerning the student population. One has rather tried to characterize the system in a given moment, not because one under-estimates the value of diacronic analyses in the sociology of teaching systems but only because one has privileged, as an element for the definition of the analysis object, the study of a situation fixed in time, and this because one thinks that the fixed moment has some characteristics that give it the potentiality of serving as a hinge moment. In the part now published, one examines the composition of schooled population in the daily official secondary teaching, taking into consideration a certain number of basic variables: sex, teaching branch (high-school or technical school), teaching degree (general or complementary course), the different courses of tecno-professional character into which technical teaching is subdivided, geographical distribution, schooling rates. From this whole it results a valuable contribution to a better knowledge concerning the secondary teaching system in Portugal.