Vasco Pulido Valente recently published a text in the Público newspaper aiming at what he himself classified as “A mistake and a shame". He was referring to the high number of graduates in sociology that have been produced by our higher education since the 80s. The number put forward by the author was 30 sociologists.
We must first analyze this number. We can consider that training is what constitutes the profession, or we can be rigorous and bear in mind that, since it is a course in social sciences, only those who practice it in the area can be considered, effectively, sociologists. Thus, I doubt that there are even more than three thousand in Portugal. Just as not all law graduates are inherently lawyers or jurists, history graduates, historians, or philosophy graduates, philosophers.
But this unusual attack is not restricted to sociology, quite the contrary – it is also directed at courses in political science, psychology and international relations, adding that these are “innocent students educated for uselessness”.
In case the reader is not aware, Vasco Pulido Valente has a degree in philosophy and a doctorate in history, two areas that could very well figure among those mentioned above as "useless", but which, because they were those in which the author graduated, were deliberately omitted.
We can then reflect on the indicated data. Vasco Pulido Valente presents 86,6% of graduates in sociology as employees, considering 63,8% that their training was adequate to the tasks they performed (data from the Portuguese Association of Sociology, APS). These numbers attest to the quality of sociology carried out in Portugal, highly praised by the International Association of Sociology (ISA) and which leads hundreds of foreign sociologists to travel to Portugal annually. If there is an area of education where Portugal does not export graduates, it is in sociology.
There are, at this moment, as many courses in higher education in sociology as there are in history and philosophy combined, with the slight nuance that, unlike these, no sociology course is in danger of closing. At the same time, data from DGES show that there are more unemployed in the area of history and philosophy than in sociology, even though they are more numerous.
Vasco Pulido Valente also points out that it was up to the State to “give a way of life” to graduates in sociology, as they do not have a job in the private sector. Since sociology graduates are as incapable as the author makes them seem, it is curious how they are then preferred to work in research centers, universities, observatories, autarchies and in public administration to the detriment of other areas (such as history and philosophy, by way of example).
But this indignation towards sociology is understandable. In fact, the entire tone of provocation to the social sciences and humanities evident in the text denounces the intentions of Vasco Pulido Valente, who ended up rehearsing an attack on professional classes that, in an idiosyncratic conservative liberal view, are of little use to society.
In fact, liberal technocracy tends to consider historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, diplomats, psychologists and other professionals in the social and human area as an obstacle to development. Ideally, the country would only have health professionals, engineers, economists and technicians from the “hard sciences”.
This desire to instrumentalize higher education, subordinating it to the power line, led, in 69, the students of the University of Coimbra to assume a position of civil disobedience that would last for several months. In Cavaco Silva's last government, contesting bribes would lead thousands of students to the streets, in defense of higher education and against a university for the rich. The universality of education would then be at stake, which is the basic principle of any Democratic State of Law.
Many were those who never dealt well with these historical events. The students' irreverence and non-alignment bothered them. Nowadays reality hasn't changed that much. Higher education continues to suffer attempts at instrumentalization and budget cuts for teaching and research only aggravate the situation. culture of poverty that marked Portugal for centuries, placing us among the European countries with the highest rates of illiterates, school dropouts and low qualifications of the population until very recently.
This professional class war has been one of the hallmarks of liberal conservative educational policy that sees these courses as a waste of public money. In light of these considerations, it makes perfect sense that sociology has been the most targeted, since it is the largest of all these areas, the most widespread in the country and is guided by a non-alignment with power and ideological trends , valuing critical freedom and reflexivity above all.
This was the great reason why sociology in Portugal was residual until the April Revolution, as its epistemological position and its own deontology would never allow it to be instrumentalized by a repressive and dictatorial State.
Quoting one of the great sociologists in our square, Elísio Estanque, “sociology was born in the XNUMXth century when the “social question” and the misery of the working class threatened the emerging capitalism in the Western world.” Today, faced with a new state of bankruptcy of capitalism that has brought nothing but misery, unemployment and a progressive deterioration of the Welfare State (as if our leaders had never studied Bismarck), it is up to sociology to understand and explain this State of Things and contribute to change.
And let those who believe that sociologists will someday be submissive to economic power and any ideology must be disappointed. A fact of this was the enormous contribution that the sociology of education made to what is known today about teaching, pedagogy and educational policies.
As for Vasco Pulido Valente, it would do well to honor the ontological principles of philosophy and not forget the lessons of history, contributing to the manipulation of reality and the degradation of social cohesion. A state does not survive when its elements are constantly in conflict with each other.
Author J. André Guerreiro, philosophy, political science and history trainer, currently studying sociology at the University of Algarve.
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