In reading my personal story, it is important to note that my experiences were not atypical of the situation of many Portuguese–Canadian youth, growing up in Toronto, in the early 1970's. The problems and issues which I have highlighted were shared by most of my friends and colleagues and, although I was fortunate that the anxieties and uncertainties which I faced did not prevent me from continuing towards a post–secondary education, the reality for the majority of the Portuguese children in this city was that these factors were often translated into formidable barriers to academic success.

In fact, as I will argue in Chapter 3, there is now a growing body of evidence which illustrates that Portuguese–Canadian children and youth have been failing massively in the Public and Separate School systems of the City of Toronto, where the bulk of the Portuguese-Canadian community resides. While Luso–Canadians make up one of the largest ethnic minorities in this city and Portuguese children constitute almost 10% of the total number of students in Toronto Public Secondary Schools, (Cheng, Yau & Ziegler, 1993), they have consistently displayed some of the most severely disproportionate rates of underachievement of any ethnic group in achieving adequate educational goals. In past years, Portuguese children have left school earlier, studied at significantly lower levels, and been disproportionately represented in Special Education and Remedial Reading programmes, than is the case with the majority of children from other ethnic groups. They have also been reported as the least likely to feel that they have the ability to succeed in university, (Larter, Cheng, Capps & Lee, 1982). More alarmingly, however, recent evidence also suggests that this trend has not diminished with the entrance into the school system of the “second-generation” (the popular term for those young people of Portuguese descent who were born in this country, or who came to these shores before their early adulthood) (Cheng, Yau & Ziegler, 1993).

Yet, despite this troubling state of affairs, most researchers, as well as many educators, have all but ignored this problem. As I will describe in Chapter 4, (where I review the relevant literature on education in the Luso-Canadian community), very little research been conducted on the topic of Portuguese immigrants, in general, and almost no serious work has been undertaken on the situation of Portuguese children in Canada, or on the reasons for their educational difficulties. Furthermore, virtually no study has yet consulted directly and on a large-scale with the wider Portuguese-Canadian community, in order to examine how Luso-Canadians perceive their situation in relation to the mainstream and other immigrant groups, particularly with regards to their children’s education.

The bulk of the information on Luso-Canadian youth and on such issues as their education is still scattered throughout a host of newspaper articles, brief, superficial ethnic profiles and anecdotal accounts, (ex. Brazao, 1978; Bulger, 1987; Coelho, 1973; Hartwig, 1979; Leishman, 1978; Matas, 1984; Neves, 1977; Nunes, 1986a, 1986b; Ward, 1985) (See also Teixeira & Lavigne's [1992, in press] bibliographies). Some information is also available within a limited number of more scholarly historical and sociological references (ex. Alpalhão & Da Rosa, 1979, 1980, 1983; Anderson, 1974; Anderson & Higgs, 1976; Noivo, 1993, 1997). Only a small number of primary research reports have been conducted specifically on the issue of the education of Luso-Canadian youth (Cummins, 1991; Cummins, Lopes & King, 1987; Cummins, Lopes & Ramos, 1987; Feuerverger, 1991; Januario, 1992; McLaren, 1986; Peppler & Lessa, no date).[1]

Most of the newspaper and ethnic profile references are sparse, non-academic, anecdotal, and child-centred in nature. Quite often, they are rife with culturally–biased and unsubstantiated assumptions and generalizations, while also neglecting to describe the part which school practices and the school environment play in structuring underachievement.

The historical and sociological works, while more thorough and academically rigorous, are nonetheless very few in number and limited by the fact that they tend to touch upon the issue of the younger generations and their education, in only an indirect and haphazard fashion. Furthermore, much of the information which is contained in these sources was derived from the latter anecdotal accounts and, with the exception of Noivo’s (1997) sociological examination of three generations of Luso-Canadians, virtually none of the material which is found in these references was acquired through primary, community-based research.

The limited number of primary research studies which have been conducted on the topic of the education of Luso-Canadian youth tend to contradict or disprove many of the observations and conclusions within the general sources, and generally focus upon the harmful role of certain classroom practices on the academic achievement of these students.

Yet, these are also few in number, fragmented, and tend to concentrate upon describing disadvantaging classroom policies, practices, attitudes and rituals, which have been regarded as contributing to underachievement. Ultimately, while these descriptions have been valuable in understanding the effects which the school environment can have upon the academic success of Luso-Canadian students, nonetheless, they have provided few answers into the process of how/why, these disadvantaging educational factors have come to predominate and how/why they have been allowed to continue, in the light of evidence linking them to underachievement (ex. “streaming”) and in the face of a rising community outcry.

One important reason for these omissions is that previous studies have generally tended to focus on the schools and on Portuguese-Canadian children, in isolation from their community. Past works have failed to explore the social, cultural and economic context in which Luso-Canadian children and their families exist, or how these may affect educational decisions. For example, while researchers have given broad acknowledgement to the working-class status of the children who participated in their projects, nonetheless, they have not entered into an analysis of how the social and economic realities of this existence may affect the degree to which Luso-Canadian families are able, or unable, to overcome the educational barriers which these studies have identified.

Similarly, most of these studies have also cited the relationship of unequal power and status between Portuguese- and maintream-Canadian societies as one of the major reasons for the perpetuation of the observed practices. Yet, no study has yet attempted to understand, or even describe, this relationship. Moreover, while a few of these works have made some efforts to ascertain how teachers and educators view their Portuguese students, no study has, as yet, sought to understand the opinions of Luso-Canadians on this issue. No research project has ever been conducted which examines the unequal situation of Luso-Canadians from the point of view of community members, or investigated the ways in which this inequality may affect community attitudes regarding work and education.

Thus, by focussing on the schools and on children, researchers have also avoided investigating the role which community attitudes and practices may play in influencing the educational decisions of its members. For example, researchers have still not adequately described what factors lead many Luso-Canadian youth who are experiencing educational barriers to drop out, rather than seek out other options.

In summary, most studies have failed to address the ways in which Luso-Canadians regard themselves, their problems, strengths, self-definitions and perceptions of roles, in relation to mainstream Canadian society and to other minority groups. More importantly, they have neglected to form an understanding of these issues from the specific point of view of the members of the Portuguese community. None of these studies has approached the community-at-large in order to attempt to comprehend the manner in which Luso-Canadians regard themselves, their families, their community and their present situation, relative to other minorities and to the mainstream. Consequently, they have done little to seek out the reasons why Luso-Canadian parents and the wider Portuguese community have so-far failed to develop effective personal or collective strategies, to overcome these disadvantaging educational practices.

Ironically enough, by disregarding the role of the community in underachievement, these studies have also forwarded the conclusion that Luso-Canadians are relatively unimportant in this equation and powerless in the face of the educational difficulties of their children. By not exploring the influence of the interpretations, practices and attitudes of community members on academic failure, researchers have inadvertently promoted the assumption that these are far less important than school practices in affecting role and identity definitions, career choices or educational decisions.

Yet, as my personal story has suggested, the personal, subjective evaluations of Portuguese-Canadian students are often of primal importance in their decision to terminate, or continue, their education. Similarly, the work of underachievement scholars such as John Ogbu (1974, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1991) has shown that a minority community’s attitudes towards their place in society and in the education system are crucial in determining how their children will respond to the barriers which they face in school. Such underachievement variables as early–school–leaving are almost always intermeshed with strong social, psychological and personal considerations on the part of students, regarding intimate concepts of self, identity, roles, group membership and society. These, in turn, are heavily influenced by prevailing community attitudes and opinions concerning a group’s historical, economic and political situation, status and role definitions (particularly in relation to mainstream society); concepts which, as scholars such as Ogbu (1974, 1978) and Cummins (1989, 1994, 1996) have argued, are themselves determined by the interplay of strong conflicting social forces, mediated and interpreted within a setting of political, economic and cultural dominance.

As such, the issue of underachievement cannot be successfully studied without understanding the perception of those individuals who are most affected by the problem, regarding the ontological and existential situation of domination in which they and their communities exist.

One of the reasons why researchers have not focussed upon the problem of Portuguese underachievement from a community perspective may rest with the fact that previous studies have not reflected any real involvement and control in the research process on the part of the people who are directly suffering the problem at hand. Previous researchers have mostly utilized ethnographic interviews and participant observation to structure the focus of their projects. In all cases, the authors of these studies have been the ones who selectively chose the research questions and methods, interpreted and contextualized the results and then divulged, in their own words and through their own choice of vehicles, the information which was provided by their participants. None of the available works provides any indication that Portuguese participants and contributors were allowed to formulate initial questions regarding their situation, determine the research process, identify the major issues, interpret observations or formulate conclusions. Community members were not granted the opportunity to question researchers' assumptions, nor were any other allowances made for the former to determine the means by which they were going to explore their own existential situation as a minority living within a structure of mainstream domination. In essence, by relegating Luso–Canadians to the status of passive participants previous empirical studies have reproduced, in the relationship of researcher to researched, the same structure of domination which many researchers on minority schooling have linked to underachievement.[2]

For all of these reasons, it becomes imperative that an inquiry into the community’s educational “problem” be initiated, developed and evaluated from the personal and existential perspective of individuals from the Portuguese community, rather than from the point–of–view of seemingly "unbiased" researchers.

This tendency to focus on school practices and policies, in disparagement of the role of the community, has developed concomitantly with another failing of the limited empirical work on the schooling of Portuguese-Canadian children: This is that, these have generally not been grounded in the growing literature on minority underachievement. Few of these studies have made reference either to the ways in which existing theories might explain the underachievement of Luso-Canadian children, or elaborated on how the case of the Portuguese in Canada could, itself, contribute to current theoretical postulates for minority academic underachievement. In consequence, almost none of the studies on Luso-Canadian students has taken a broad, community-focussed approach.

Yet, as I discuss in Chapter 4, the body of research on this topic has moved away from analyses of “cultural differences” between teachers and pupils and become increasingly concerned with the influence upon educational achievement of unequal relations of power between majority and minority groups and on the way in which subordinate communities perceive their roles within a system of cultural and economic domination (Apple, 1979; Cummins, 1989, chap. 5, 1989; Foley, 1991; Jacob & Jordan, 1987; Ogbu, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1987; Trueba, Spindler & Spindler, 1989).

In particular, John Ogbu’s “Cultural Ecological Theory of School Performance” (Ogbu & Simons, 1998) (also referred to as “Caste Theory”) (Foley, 1991) and Paulo Freire’s (1970) work on critical pedagogy, both present models which may at lease partly explain why an economically and culturally subordinate community, such as that of Luso-Canadians, might be experiencing educational problems. Ogbu (1974, 1978, 1983, 1987) has argued convincingly over the last few decades that the way in which a minority community views itself and its roles in relation to the mainstream - and particularly the function which its members attribute to the majority society’s education system within this relationship - are crucial elements in influencing the academic decisions of its children in mainstream schools.For his part, Freire (1970) has also argued that the tendency in a society will often be for a dominant group to “dehumanize” those who are less powerful, by using the education system to invalidate the latter’s knowledge and their view of the world; thus leading those who are dominated (or “oppressed,” as Freire termed it) to struggle unsuccessfully to continually attempt to remake themselves in the image of their “oppressors.”

As I will discuss in Chapter 11, Ogbu’s theory falls short of explaining the situation of Luso-Canadians, in that this community often does not appear to fit neatly into the typology which his theory has postulated for a “successful” (or “voluntary”) minority group. Ogbu’s model also places an undue emphasis upon the mechanisms by which a minority group has come to be marginalized within a dominant society (i.e.. the voluntary/involuntary dichotomy) and on the issue of race-based discrimination, as a marginalizing factor. In this fashion, it fails to more deeply investigate the profound effects of the state of marginalization itself, upon the educational achievement of minorities such as the Portuguese, which are marginalized by virtue of a wide number of factors, (ex. low education and income, low-status culture, rural origins, disproportionate migration from only one segment of society, lack of tradition of political involvement, etc.).

In this respect, the ideas of Paulo Freire (1970, 1994) provide a better framework with which to explore the educational effects of the linguistic and cultural domination of a low-status, little-schooled, working-class minority, such as the Portuguese in Canada. This is because, Freire’s main concern is in charting the process of domination and detailing how it may be overcome. However, the works of both authors have pointed to the need to explore and validate the opinions, viewpoints and knowledge of the Luso-Canadian community.

In summary, while Luso-Canadian children continue to underachieve in disproportionate numbers, little scholarly attention has been focussed on the Portuguese community and on the issue of the underachievement of Portuguese-Canadian youth.

Most of the available general literature on the Luso-Canadian ethnic group touches only superficially on the topic of the younger generations and their education, while the small number of scholarly studies which have been conducted on the schooling issues of children and youth in this community have looked mainly at the role of school practices in structuring academic failure.

Consequently, no study, as yet, has examined the complex, larger–world dynamic of the social, cultural and economic situation of the Portuguese in Canada. More importantly, no study has yet sought out the opinions of Luso-Canadians themselves, in order to discover - in their own words - how they view their community and their roles within the context of the social, cultural and linguistic domination of their group, as well as how this may ultimately impact upon their children’s schooling. Previous studies have also not allowed community members any input into researchers’ assumptions and the research process.

Finally, few of the studies conducted on the Portuguese-Canadians have been grounded on - and contributed to - established theoretical work on minority underachievement. In this fashion, the importance of community attitudes, opinions and world-views has been largely minimized, while the structure linking academic underachievement - and, in particular, early-school-leaving - amongst Portuguese–Canadians to a particular set of social, cultural, political and economic realities and power constructs has so–far escaped analysis from a social and critical pedagogy perspective.

Thus, previous research has left a number of important questions which still remain unanswered:

1. What is the overall educational, economic, political, social and cultural context of the Portuguese-Canadian community? What relationships, if any, do community members feel exist between this context and the academic underachievement of their children?

2. What do Luso-Canadians perceive to be their situation, and their roles, in relation to mainstream Canadian society and other minority groups? What do Luso-Canadians perceive to be the role of the attitudes and practices of community members in the problem of academic underachievement?

3. What kinds of priorities and actions do community members see for a grass-roots, community organization such as the Congress in bringing about the resolution of these problems?

4. How does the case of the Portuguese in Canada serve to clarify prevailing theories on minority academic underachievement, or, how do these theories help to explain the educational problems of the Portuguese?

The study outlined in the following pages proposed to examine these very questions, from a participatory, community-development framework, and from the perspective of critical pedagogy.

The present study was designed to address at least some of these questions. This project comprised part of a national Needs Assessment commissioned in 1994 by the Portuguese-Canadian National Congress, a non-profit, grass-roots organization, with a membership in every region of this country.[3] As such, it represented the first time that a study of its kind had been focussed on the Canada-wide Luso-Canadian population. As Chapter 7 describes, it also represented the first time that a study of this nature had been conceived, developed, undertaken and disseminated in its entirety by members of the Portuguese-Canadian community. The project provided an opportunity for Luso-Canadians across this nation to define, in their own words, what they saw to be the educational, economic, political, social and cultural situation of their communities, in relation to mainstream Canadian society and other minority groups.

The Needs Assessment was originally commissioned by the Congress to serve as an organizational tool, one which would help to set direction for the group in the coming years. However, as the meetings with the Steering Committee, Research Coordinator and Congress Directors progressed, the groups soon recognized a valuable opportunity to undertake a project with much more scope and breadth and to address a number of specific themes, which had previously not been explored by researchers and community workers.

Firstly, through the gathering of broad indicators on demographics, income and education, the study attempted to provide a “snapshot” of the current state of the national Luso-Canadian community, in relation to the rest of Canadian society (see Chapter 8). Secondly, it surveyed Portuguese-Canadians across Canada for their opinions regarding what they felt were the major issues affecting their communities. It also gathered opinions from Luso-Canadians on priorities and how they felt that a grass-roots, community organization such as the Congress could bring about the resolution of these problems. Finally, it attempted to highlight the patterns of integration, and access to social services of those people who are most involved in community organizations.[4]

As Chapter 7 will indicate, data for this project was collected through the compilation of available indicators from the 1991 census, the distribution of a detailed 14-page questionnaire and the realization of 18 focus groups, conducted nationally in regions of significant Portuguese-Canadian populations. The project also included the publication of a nationally-distributed newsletter and a media campaign, which served to maintain the wider community informed of its developments (see Appendices).

One important aspect of this study was the emphasis which was placed on full community control and participation of the study at all stages of its development and realization. A community Steering Committee planned and developed every aspect of this study, from the formulation of the goals and research design, the development of the questionnaire and focus group questions, to the selection of the method of distribution of the research results. Furthermore, volunteers from the various local Luso-Canadian communities comprising this study were sought out to organize, moderate and record the focus groups. Finally, numerous other Portuguese-Canadian individuals and organizations scattered throughout this country also made significant in-kind and volunteer contributions to the study (ex. use of meeting facilities).

As Chapter 10 illustrates, the study provided a vehicle through which Luso-Canadians across this country painted a picture in their own words of the social, economic, political and educational marginalization of their community and of the negative effects which this has had over the quality of life for many in this group. A picture has also emerged of a community with an enormous educational deficit, one which puts it in a great deal of disadvantage in comparison to the mainstream and to other minority groups. Participants throughout this study described in great detail, the importance which educational issues occupied in their communities and elaborated on the interrelationships which they felt existed between the low educational levels of Luso-Canadians and their lack of unity, political participation, social integration, economic difficulties and low social standing in Canadian society.

Ultimately, what has emerged from this study is a picture of a community in crisis: One which is experiencing widespread marginalization, cultural annihilation (due to the rapid loss of the Portuguese language and culture amongst Luso-Canadian youth) and social reproduction (where disproportionate numbers of its young people are heading en-masse into the same marginalized socioeconomic role as that of their parents).

This educational deficit has left the community disunited and ill-prepared for the economic challenges of the future. More importantly however, it has also forestalled the development of a critical mass of well-educated middle-class, professional individuals, who would have the necessary knowledge, economic and political clout to advocate with governments, on behalf of the community.

The case of the Portuguese in Canada also serves to highlight the limitations of one of the leading theories on minority academic underachievement, the “Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance” (or “Caste Theory”) (Ogbu, 1974, 1978; 1982; 1983; 1987; 1991; Ogbu & Simons, 1998). The case of Portuguese-Canadians represent an example where a group which, under Ogbu’s typologies, he would classify as a “voluntary” minority displays many of the same attributes and educational difficulties which he attributes to “involuntary” minorities. Ultimately, Ogbu’s theory does not seem to be able to account for the academic difficulties of this substantial immigrant minority.

In this respect, the Luso-Canadian example would appear to best be explained through the prism of the work of Paulo Freire, whose ideas explain the dynamics between dominant and subordinate societal groups, and whose perspective of a critical pedagogy may best address the educational and political needs of the Portuguese community (Freire, 1970, 1994).

The pedagogical implications of adopting a “Freirian” approach to the issue of education in the Luso-Canadian community, may lead to important strategies which focus upon combating the social, cultural and political marginalization of the community, that is perpetuating the underachievement problem. It may also result in mobilizing action on the part of the community to develop educational strategies, particularly in light of the increasing centralization of education in Ontario and the recent creation of local “School Councils.” A “Freirian” approach, if effectively implemented, could potentially provide this community with a greater grass-roots community input into the manner in which education is administered by providing them with the necessary critical tools to collective mobilize and influence the functioning of their local school, to a much greater extent than what has currently been the case.

[1] In addition, one other valuable study has been conducted in the United States, (Becker, 1990).

[2] This also may be the reason why much of the information that is available in both the general and empirical literature appears very much to have developed from, and to uncritically support, the particular train of political thought of each, individual, author.

[3] For more information on the Congress and its beginnings in March of 1993, please see (Costa, 1995).

[4] This part of the study was not included in this dissertation.