I can best express the feeling with the following phrase I heard recently from a former director of Disney World in Florida “It’s not magic that makes this place work, it's work that makes this place magic”. Basically, if you don’t sew you cannot harvest.

What would you like to see changed in the Portuguese educational system?
Portugal needs to come to grips with the fact that the educational system is not a free good and that resources are scarce and should be considered in competing uses. So, education has to use resources efficiently like all other sectors of the economy. The educational system needs to be restructured to place incentives in the right place. As it is, there are too many vested interests managing it. Teachers and students end up intervening in a myriad of decisions of which they are the main beneficiaries, without significant outside auditing. In the end there is a wrong perception that the system is of very low cost for the internal stakeholders, leading to a wrong distribution of resources.

Merit is frequently not the criteria to determine who gets what. Productivity is, as such, low for students, for teachers, for researchers and for administrators. The system should be changed to reward achievement and avoid all redundancies in the use of scarce resources.