The Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education today considered that education "lives on the interaction between people", ruling out the possibility of distance work replacing the face-to-face model in the post-Covid-19 period.
“We live in a time of uncertainty, but there are certain certainties and one of these has to do with the centrality of people, with the centrality of competences and, certainly, that people and competences demand physical presence and interaction”, said Manuel Heitor.
The minister participated today in one of the debates of the “Skills 4 post-Covid – Skills for the future” initiative, promoted by the Directorate-General for Higher Education (DGES), which took place at ISCTE, in Lisbon, and reinforced the importance of continuing the privileging face-to-face work, after a phase in which teaching is done at a distance, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
«Using the opportunities that these accelerated crises in time give us, we can strengthen the position of Higher Education in Portuguese society, as long as it clearly emphasizes that it has to be in person», he considered.
Manuel Heitor said that some Higher Education institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States have already announced that the remote learning model will be maintained in the next school year, but he pointed out that these universities are positioned "in a world of their own" and, therefore, it would be It is illusory to believe that the same could apply in the Portuguese context.
"We have to understand how we can differentiate ourselves in the European context and understand how Higher Education in Portugal can also present its own strategy, valuing presence", considered the minister.
Keeping his eyes on the future, Manuel Heitor also admitted that one of the main lessons to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic is that societies must «learn with risk and learn to live with risk».
“The positioning of Higher Education is particularly opportune to value how we can transmit to society and to social, economic and individual actors this idea of having to prepare generations to live with more risks”, he stressed.
In the debate that focused on competencies for the future and on the work developed by ISCTE in the area of data science, the minister considered that, in addition to technologies in general and data science in particular, competencies for the future should be, above all, , transversal, also passing through the social and human sciences.
This aspect was also valued by the former governor and current executive president of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Paulo Macedo, who considered that, despite the changes introduced by the pandemic in the labor market, a set of skills remains.
«It's not with Covid-19 that everything changes and we continue to need the usual characteristics of people», he considered, referring to the so-called 'soft skills', such as resilience, motivation and leadership capacity.
The Skills 4 post-Covid initiative was launched in early May, with the aim of strengthening and enhancing the joint response of the science and higher education systems to the challenges posed by the pandemic which, in Portugal, has already caused 1.330 deaths and infected 30.788 people.
Portugal entered on the 3rd of May in a situation of calamity due to the pandemic, after three consecutive periods in a state of emergency since the 19th of March.
This new phase of combating Covid-19 provides for mandatory confinement for sick people and under active surveillance, the general duty of home collection and the mandatory use of masks or visors in public transport, public services, schools and commercial establishments.
The Government approved new measures that came into force on Monday, including the resumption of visits to users of nursing homes, the reopening of day care centers, classroom classes for 11th and 12th graders and the reopening of some street stores, cafes, restaurants, museums, monuments and palaces.
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