page_title: António de Oliveira Salazar
section_title: Education and literacy rates
hierarchical_section_title: António de Oliveira Salazar / Politics and Estado Novo / Education and literacy rates
caption_attribution_description: Українська: Обов'язкові елементи початкових шкіл часів Нової держави (Португалія): портрет Салазара, хрест Розп'яття і портрет Америку Томаша. Фотографія зроблена в Пеніші Português: Elementos obrigatórios da escola em tempos do Estado Novo (Portugal): Salazar, Crucifixo e Américo Thomaz. Fotografia tirada em Peniche
context_page_description: António de Oliveira Salazar GCTE GCSE GColIH GCIC was a Portuguese statesman who served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He was responsible for the Estado Novo, the corporatist authoritarian government that ruled Portugal until 1974.
  A trained economist, Salazar entered public life as finance minister with the support of President Óscar Carmona after the Portuguese coup d'état of 28 May 1926. The military of 1926 saw themselves as the guardians of the nation, but they had no clue how to address the critical challenges of the hour. Within one year, armed with special powers, Salazar balanced the budget and stabilized Portugal's currency. Restoring order to the national accounts, enforcing austerity and red-penciling waste, Salazar produced the first of many budgetary surpluses, an unparalleled novelty in Portugal. In four years he showed himself to be an even more accomplished political wizard than an economic one. He civilianized the authoritarian regime when the politics of more and more countries were becoming militarized. Salazar's aim was the depoliticization of society not the mobilization of populace.
context_section_description: Although the militants of the First Republic had chosen education as one of their banner causes, the evidence shows that First Republic was less successful than the authoritarian Estado Novo in expanding elementary education. Under the First Republic, literacy levels in children aged 7 to 14 registered a modest increase from 26% in 1911 to 33% in 1930. Under the Estado Novo, literacy levels in children aged 7 to 14 increased to 56% in 1940, 77% in 1950 and 97% in 1960. 
  Under Salazar the number of elementary schools grew from 7,000 in 1927 to 10,000 in 1940. While the illiteracy rate under the twenty years of the First Republic had only dropped a modest 9%, under Salazar in twenty years, the illiteracy rate dropped 21%, from 61.8% in 1930 to 40.4% in 1950. In 1940, the regime celebrated the fact that for the first time in Portuguese History, the majority of the population could read and write.
  In 1952 a vast multi-pronged “Plan for Popular Education” was launched with the intent of finally extirpating illiteracy and putting into school every child of school age. This plan included fines for parents who did not comply, and these were strictly enforced. By the late 1950s Portugal had succeed in pulling itself out of the educational abyss in which it had long found itself: illiteracy among children of school age virtually disappeared.
  In the 1960s, Portugal founded universities in the overseas provinces of Angola and Mozambique (the University of Luanda and the University of Lourenço Marques). In 1971, it recognised the Portuguese Catholic University, and by 1973 founded several state-run universities across mainland Portugal (the Minho University, the New University of Lisbon, the University of Évora, and the University of Aveiro). In addition, the long-established universities of Lisbon and Coimbra were greatly expanded and modernised. New buildings and campuses were constructed, such as the Cidade Universitária (Lisbon) and the Alta Universitária (Coimbra).
  The last two decades of the Estado Novo, from the 1960s to the 1974 Carnation Revolution were marked by strong investment in secondary and university education, which experienced one of the fastest growth rates of Portuguese education in history.
caption: Required elements of primary schools during the Estado Novo: a crucifix and portraits of Salazar and Américo Tomás.
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