Ana Benavente

Ana Benavente (born 11 August 1945) is a Portuguese activist, educationist, university professor and politician who has served as secretary of state for education and member of the Assembly of the Republic.

Early life Benavente was born on 11 August 1945, the daughter of primary school teachers. Having lived the early years of her life in Cartaxo, a rural area to the northeast of Lisbon, she arrived in the Portuguese capital in 1960/61 to complete her high school studies at the Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho High School, living as a boarder. A good student, she was admitted in 1962/63 to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon without needing to take an entrance exam.

In her first days of college, she joined a student organization led by José Medeiros Ferreira, who would later be expelled from the university by the authoritarian Estado Novo government for leading protests. Around this time, she also met Odete Santos, a law student who, like her and Ferreira, would go on to become members of the Assembly of the Republic after the Estado Novo had been overthrown.

In 1999, 25 years after the Carnation Revolution, former Portuguese emigrées in Geneva, including Benavente, paid tribute to the city, thanking it for the exile it granted them. They left a plaque (made of Portuguese marble) on the wall of a famous and now-defunct university café. More recently, Benavente has been a full professor and president of the ethics committee of the Universidade Lusófona in Lisbon and has contributed to newspapers such as Público.

Benavente obtained a PhD in the sociology of education from the University of Geneva in 1985. She was a professor with the Department of Education of the University of Lisbon until 1993, when she was appointed as principal researcher of the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the university. There she developed a programme for educational improvement in Portugal, which emphasised (1) pre-school education; (2) a consistent approach to education regardless of the political party in power, ensuring the autonomy of schools; (3) medium- and long-term guidelines for elementary and secondary education; (4) emphasis on the most vulnerable and an avoidance of exclusion; and (5) adult education. She also stressed the need for school sports, health and sex education, and the upgrading of teacher training. In the October 1995 election she was also elected to the Assembly of the Republic as a representative of the Santarém constituency, being re-elected in the 1999 election and serving until 2005 as a representative of the Viseu constituency. She later became disenchanted with the PS, particularly with its education policy, and resigned from the party, subsequently voting for the extreme left Left Bloc.

Awards and honours Benavente was made a Commander of the Spanish Order of Isabella the Catholic in 2000 and a Grand Officer of the Portuguese Order of Prince Henry in 2005.