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Public consultation of documents on Education for Citizenship ends today

The new National Citizenship Education Strategy (ENEC), which will replace the previous one from 2017, and new essential learning guidelines, set to regulate the Citizenship and Development subject, were made public on July 21 and have since been open for public consultation.

Initially set to end on August 1, the consultation period was extended due to constraints experienced during the first few days on the Directorate-General for Education’s website, where the process is ongoing.

The website was down for several hours, and the high number of access attempts also affected various other services of the Ministry of Education, causing disruptions during that period.

Changes to the Citizenship and Development subject, in particular, have sparked controversy, as the new guidelines appear to pay less attention to topics previously contested by some conservative movements, such as sexuality.

Once the document was made public — nearly a month after the government presented the general lines and assured, at the time, that no topics would be removed — criticism from associations and experts grew over the apparent absence of Sexual Education.

In response to the opposition, the Ministry of Education, Science, and Innovation assured that the topic will not disappear from Citizenship and Development classes, despite the words “sexual” or “sexuality” not being mentioned. It also emphasized that sexual education will continue to be taught transversally, recalling the 2009 law that establishes the regime for sexual education in schools.

Nevertheless, in a statement sent to the government, the Portuguese Psychologists Association recommended the explicit inclusion of sexual education in the school curriculum, considering that in the executive’s proposal, “the reference to sexuality in the curricula is restricted, limited, and technically imprecise.”

Among political parties, the changes displeased both the right — with Chega criticizing the reference to “non-normative sexual orientation and gender identity and expression” in the human rights chapter — and the left, unanimously accusing it of regression and yielding to the far-right.

Launched in 2017 by then-Socialist Minister Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, Citizenship and Development functions as a transversal work area in the 1st cycle, a subject in the 2nd and 3rd cycles, and as a training component in secondary education, leaving it to schools to decide if it is taught as an autonomous subject or in a multidisciplinary manner.

This organization will not change, but the current 17 domains, some mandatory and others optional, will be integrated into eight mandatory dimensions: Human Rights, Democracy and Political Institutions, Sustainable Development, Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurship, Health, Media, Risk and Road Safety, and Cultural Pluralism and Diversity.

In October last year, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro had announced the review of Citizenship and Development and the intention to free the subject from “ideological shackles.”

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