Learning to read, evaluating reading

The worst enemy of progress in Portugal is ignorance. Once the battle for alphabetization is won, the struggle for literacy in administration and management is in front of us. This statement is not meant to be derogatory of agents or organizations, but taken as a useful metaphor.

An analphabet cannot read, a functional analphabet is unable to read. Thus, in complex problems, this analphabet offers basic responses, and to the unknown he reacts with the simple answers he knows.

The case of the PPC, the famous (ill-famed, some would argue) Public Procurement Code, is paradigmatic. It was conceived as instrument of transparency and respect for the rules of competition, but was designed as one-size-fits-all for any service or activity.

The scientific community has consistently tried to explain that this suit does not fit the R & D body, in a painful ordeal only comparable, in pain, to the iterated failure of the passage of the message in certain national sectors. A gifted individual understood it - and we stumble again upon the name of Mariano Gago, any surprise? - but then we crashed head-on with persons who could not read and tried again to force a neck 41 in a shirt 37. Result, the asphyxia - metaphor with tragic aroma of reality.

Now that there are new winds of literacy blowing, which we greet, a challenge must be placed to the Government of Portugal: the urge to make a thorough assessment of the reality and consequences of the PPC. Not only from the legal point of view, which is what has prevailed, but from the point of view of the consequences and results: economic (what added costs are being generated) and social (what perverse phenomena are being generated, contradicting the generous original intent).

Worse than deploying a system, good or bad, is not evaluating it, and believing it to be perfect.