Brain teasers: putting up a fight
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abstract
Our underlying question echoes many teachers’ concern: how can we motivate today’s students in
our increasingly technological era? Considering that the current educational system dates back to the
Industrial Revolution, it is wholly unfit to grapple with students’ interests and engagements. There
are scholars who liken the educational organisation to an assembly line, according to which pupils
are grouped in a class by “date of manufacture”, disregarding all personal traits and constraints that
necessarily distinguish all pupils and students alike, be it at Basic Education and Secondary School
or at Higher Education. Despite growing discussions and numerous attempts to change systems throughout
the world, we are still obsessed with the use of course books (and thus encourage publishers’
manipulative presence in education), with standardising testing, with the distinction between bright/
academic/ high-mark and non-bright/ non-academic/ low-mark students and with a number of unfathomable
dichotomies. We seek to discuss a number of inconsistencies we perceive in the Portuguese
education system and the manner in which they may hamper an up-to-date educational approach and
prevent the dethroning of the prevailing mainstream education paradigm. The current Finnish system,
considered to be the best in Europe (if not the world) for various consecutive years, may serve as the
role model, stressing out that standardisation does not equal quality no more than frenetic evaluation
equals acquisition of knowledge and lifelong skills. Critical thinking (CT) may entail the answer and
enable us as teachers to tease students’ brains, as well as ours, bringing in a sense of purpose and the
bigger picture to have a saying in the game. But will a selection of classroom strategies and activities
that bring about CT suffice if we are confronted with a blind administrative and bureaucratic
monster? Can teachers and students alike put up a fight? Can our brains be teased to forward motion?
