When Civic Education Becomes Optional, Democracy Becomes Inherited

The Portuguese fight over Cidadania e Desenvolvimento is not about one school subject. It is about whether democratic literacy is a public good or a family privilege.

There is a sentence repeated endlessly in debates about school: school should teach students how to think, not what to think. It is a good sentence. It is also incomplete.

A student cannot learn how to think in a democracy without learning what a democracy is. They cannot think freely about politics without understanding rights, institutions, the Constitution, media manipulation, public argument, minority protection, and the difference between disagreement and dehumanisation. A school that teaches mathematics but not democratic life is not neutral. It is simply outsourcing political formation to other forces: the family, social media, religious institutions, party propaganda, private resentment, or the loudest adult in the room.

This is the real debate behind Cidadania e Desenvolvimento in Portugal. It is not a dispute about one curricular component. It is a dispute about whether civic literacy is a common democratic inheritance or a private family inheritance.

What the subject actually is

Portugal’s own legal and curricular framework already answers this. The 2025 National Strategy for Citizenship Education, approved by Council of Ministers Resolution no. 127/2025, defines Cidadania e Desenvolvimento as a curricular reference and describes citizenship education as something integrated into school life, classroom work, school culture, and the relationship with the community. It explicitly involves students, teachers, families, and the broader community. It does not replace families; it works alongside them.

The official curricular documents are not, in their stated purpose, about telling children which party to support. They cover human rights, democracy and political institutions, sustainable development, financial literacy, pluralism and cultural diversity, media, health, and road safety. The 2026 DGE guidance describes the component as developing participation, democratic culture, respect for diversity, and the defence of human rights — within Portuguese constitutional values.

That matters, because when parties call this “indoctrination”, they avoid the harder question: indoctrination into what, exactly? Into knowing the Constitution? Into understanding the rule of law? Into recognising misinformation? Into learning that other people have rights even when we dislike them? These are not partisan luxuries. They are the basic operating system of democratic citizenship.

The Constitution is not silent here. Article 73 says education should contribute to equality of opportunity, to overcoming social, economic and cultural inequalities, and to developing tolerance, mutual understanding, solidarity, responsibility, and democratic participation in collective life. Article 43 says the state cannot programme education according to philosophical, political, ideological, aesthetic or religious directives. These two principles must be read together: the state must not impose party doctrine, and it has a constitutional duty to prepare citizens for democratic life.

That is the distinction the current debate keeps destroying. Teaching children that citizens have rights and duties is not socialist indoctrination. Teaching them that the Constitution exists is not left-wing activism. Teaching them to evaluate information is not “wokism”. It is the minimum common grammar of living in a republic.

The inheritance problem

The campaign against Cidadania e Desenvolvimento leans on a familiar slogan: the school teaches, the family educates. It sounds reasonable. Families matter. No democratic school should erase family life, culture, religion, or personal values.

But the slogan hides a dangerous transfer of responsibility. If civic education becomes optional, and each family decides whether a child learns democratic literacy, then the right to understand democracy depends on the home a child happens to be born into.

That is not neutrality. That is inheritance.

Some children grow up in homes where politics is discussed with curiosity, where disagreement is tolerated, where institutions are understood. Others grow up in homes shaped by fear, prejudice, misinformation, political cynicism, or simply silence. Most of those parents are not malicious; they are tired, overworked, or themselves products of a school system that never taught civic literacy well. If the school withdraws from this field, it does not create freedom. It reproduces inequality.

This is why “leave it to the parents” is not socially neutral. It protects the already protected. Children whose parents can explain the Constitution, the European Union, media bias, consent, taxes, corruption, and rights will keep that advantage. The rest are left to chance.

A democratic school exists precisely because birth should not determine everything.

None of this excludes parents. The 2025 national strategy explicitly names families and communities as partners, and school-level citizenship strategies are meant to connect to the local community. The question was never whether parents participate. It is whether parents should have the power to remove their children from a common civic foundation. That is a different question entirely.

The political record

This is not an abstract worry. Chega stated in 2022 that it wanted to make Cidadania e Desenvolvimento optional, arguing that its mandatory character violated family rights and amounted to ideological doctrine. The same text described classrooms as “laboratories” of social engineering and proposed that attendance should depend on the will of families — or, for older students, of the student.

In February 2025, Parliament debated several initiatives on the subject. Chega’s proposal sought to make the discipline optional. The CDS proposal demanded the end of what it called “ideological projects” and the removal of gender identity from the classroom; Jornal de Notícias reported that this proposal was approved with votes from PSD, Chega and IL.

Polígrafo later summarised the broader pattern: Chega had presented successive initiatives to strip the discipline of its compulsory character, and its 2024 project proposed that, for students under 16, parents would decide at enrolment whether the child attends. That project was rejected in February 2025 — with votes in favour from Chega, IL, CDS-PP and a non-attached former Chega deputy.

There is nuance, and honesty requires stating it. In March 2026, when PSD, Chega and CDS approved bills changing the legal regime around gender identity, IL voted against, alongside the left. IL, CDS and Chega are not identical on every cultural question. The accurate claim is narrower and still sufficient: there has been sustained parliamentary and media pressure from the right — led by Chega and CDS, at times with IL support — to weaken the compulsory civic component or restrict its content.

That is enough to justify concern.

Freedom without competence is capture

Here is the central contradiction: the same actors who claim to defend freedom propose that children receive less common civic formation. But freedom without civic competence is fragile. A person who cannot identify manipulation is not free in any meaningful political sense. A person who does not understand institutions is easier to mobilise against them. A person who never learns how rights protect minorities may only defend rights when they belong to the majority. A person never taught to distinguish evidence from noise is not “thinking for themselves” — they are available to be captured.

Civic education is not a decorative subject. It is democratic infrastructure.

The Council of Europe’s framework for democratic culture makes the same point at European level: education systems should equip young people with the competences needed to defend human rights, democracy and the rule of law, and to live peacefully with others in diverse societies. This is not radical. It is the mainstream democratic understanding of education after the twentieth century.

Answering the indoctrination fear properly

The fear of indoctrination should not be dismissed. It should be answered. A democratic state must not use school to promote a party, a government, or a closed moral doctrine. Teachers should not turn classrooms into partisan spaces. Curricula should be transparent. Parents should know what is being taught. Controversial themes should be handled with age-appropriate care, intellectual honesty, and space for questioning. Students should learn to argue, not to repeat slogans.

None of that requires making civic education optional. It requires doing it well.

In fact, the best protection against indoctrination is not silence — it is better civic education. A student who can read sources, question authority, understand rights, and argue from evidence is harder to indoctrinate than a student whose entire political education comes from home, TikTok, WhatsApp chains, or television outrage.

This is the inversion at the heart of the debate. Removing common civic literacy does not remove ideology from children’s lives. The family is not outside ideology. Social media is not outside ideology. Churches, parties, influencers and friend groups are not outside ideology. Children will encounter values no matter what. The only real question is whether they will also receive the tools to examine, compare and criticise those values under public, professional, democratic scrutiny.

That is why “school should teach how to think” is an argument for civic education, not against it. To think well, students need concepts. They need to know what a right is, what a constitution is, what a court is, what representation is, what propaganda is, what evidence is, and why freedom is impossible without limits on power.

A school that avoids all of this is not teaching students how to think. It is teaching them that democracy is background noise.

A country that should know better

There is a Portuguese historical dimension that the debate treats too casually. Portugal is not an old, continuous liberal democracy. It lived under dictatorship until 1974. Its democratic Constitution was not born from an administrative reform; it was born from rupture — with authoritarianism, censorship, colonial war, political police, and the suppression of pluralism.

To treat civic education as optional in such a country is historically careless. A democracy that stops teaching itself becomes dependent on memory. And memory fades.

Rigour, not removal

The correct response to the controversy is not to defend every lesson, every teacher, every external association, or every badly designed activity. No curriculum is above criticism. Cidadania e Desenvolvimento can and should be improved: clearer learning goals, stronger teacher training, better evaluation criteria, more transparency with families, and a serious distinction between knowledge, values, debate and activism. The official framework already points in this direction; the challenge is implementation.

But improvement is different from removal.

The democratic answer is not to make citizenship optional. It is to make citizenship rigorous. Teach the Constitution. Teach institutions. Teach the history of Portuguese democracy. Teach media literacy. Teach financial literacy without turning it into market propaganda. Teach students to debate abortion, immigration, taxation, climate, gender, policing, Europe, housing and inequality with evidence rather than tribal reflexes. Teach them that respect does not mean agreement, that freedom of expression does not eliminate responsibility, and that democracy is not voting every four years — it is the daily discipline of living with people who are not like us.

That is not teaching what to think.

That is teaching what thinking requires.

The choice being made

The deepest problem with making civic education optional is not that some parents will choose badly. It is that the state would be accepting civic inequality as normal — declaring that some children will receive democratic literacy and others may not, that rights, institutions and public reasoning are not a common foundation but a family preference.

That is a political choice. And it is not neutral.

A democratic society cannot promise equal citizenship while making the knowledge of citizenship dependent on private household ideology. Parents can and should educate. But the republic also has a duty to form citizens capable of living freely with others.

School should not tell children which party to vote for. It should make them difficult to manipulate by any party.

That is why civic education belongs in the curriculum — not as propaganda, not as moral theatre, not as bureaucratic decoration, but as one of the few places where a society can say to every child, regardless of family, class, religion or political background: you have rights, others have rights too, institutions matter, facts matter, and democracy is something you must learn to practise.

Because if school does not teach democratic citizenship, someone else will teach anti-democratic obedience.