The current crisis of the Romanian educational system is also the result of the overthrows of the values to which the society was subjected, writes Professor Andrei Avram, in an opinion text that Hotnews publishes. He states that the current educational system has accumulated so many deficiencies that he does not start even from scratch, but from the minus.
Education around the world is in a period of crisis and tries hard to redefine themselves in order to survive. The educational system in Romania is no exception, passing through an identity crisis.
The problems of the companies are reflected in those of the educational systems, the challenges being influenced including the long duration of history. In addition to the specific problems of each culture, a few dilemmas are common.
How many of the Romanians do I think if you “have a book, you have a part”?
What is the role of the school in a context in which social networks tend to become (and in certain areas of the world they have already become) the main means of information, in a world in which the information avalanche creates the illusion of knowledge and in which people ignore the experts of experts, considering the opinions of the influences?
Despite the common challenges, the current crisis of the Romanian educational system is also the result of the overthrows of the values to which the society was subjected. Almost no one believes in one of the main ideals of the modern education system, to make it possible, through education, social ascension. How many of the Romanians do I think if you “have a book, you have a part”?
In the last decades we have witnessed some magical enrichments that had nothing to do with meritocracy, with educational performance. We were led by individuals without the promoted baccalaureate exam. I have witnessed the derision of excellence, being probably the European country with the most falsified doctorates.
We are constantly transmitted the idea that the “school gets stupid” on a treadmill, that for a students, a possible choir does not reflect a tragedy because not the educated people have come to the state, but the handsomers, the former and repeated.
What is missing the educational system
To all these is added the chronic sub -financing of the educational system, the lack of attractiveness of this profession, the bottomless form of the speeches of those who have mimicked the interest for education. The lie, the imposture reached the highest level: a former teacher, who became president, who had as a country project “Educated Romania” left the country and education in comparison.
What role can the school play in a society that has stopped believing in its trainer's role? Is it all irreparably lost?
No, as long as the decision makers will be people who value the education in the true sense of the word, which are not limited to empty content formulas, who assume the specifications in documents regarding the relationship between the performance of the educational system and the national security.
Will it be easy? No, because the current educational system has accumulated so many deficiencies that it does not start even from scratch, but from the minus.
It takes people with vision, deeds, dedication. Otherwise, the educational system will reach the “garbage box of history”, and the Romanian society, in the same place, with it.
The promises of the new government
The composition of the new government could lead us to the following dilemma: would it be possible for those who would vandalize your home to be among those who promise your reconstruction? In real life, an absurdity. In Romanian politics, a record.
However, it is all known to us that politics represents the art of compromise. This time, a compromise for the benefit of citizens, including teachers and students?
By going through the government program we find that “education will be the engine of social mobility, innovation and sustainable economic development, by ensuring a student -focused, fair and inclusive education system, supported by motivated and properly trained teachers.”
However, the historical context in which we are, imposes, according to the same document, certain “economic-financial efficiency measures”.
Changes in the pre -university education system aim to modify the didactic norm by:
- “Increasing the number of hours of didactic activities in pre -university education, minimum to the level of average value at European/OECD level”
- “The analysis of the travings of time and their granting, usually, during the non -idactic time of the norm”
- “Analysis of the actual number of hours, related to the normal number of hours within a teacher”
- “The payment by time will be reported at the total working time (40 hours per week), to avoid the situation in which one hour for the hour payment costs more than an hour from the didactic norm.”
After years of struggles, we return where we left
Another level aims to reduce the number of scholarships, these having to “adequately reflect two things: the support for difficult socioeconomic conditions and/or for educational excellence”.
Other measures are aimed at: “increasing the minimum number of children in a class” and “increasing the maximum number of children in one class”. I admit, initially I thought that fatigue has made its mark on my ability to understand the meaning of a text.
Later it was confirmed from the highest level: it is desired to increase the number of students in the class. So, after years of struggles in this regard, we return where we left. Overcrowded classes, teachers who are unable to pay proper attention to each student. In this context, my repetitive formula from the new law of education is often in mind: the “best interest” of the student
It is also remembered that the norm of teaching teachers in Romania will be at the level of the European average. The minister emphasized his good intentions: “At the average level that exists in the European Union or in the OECD. Do you find something wrong with that? I have not said the most.”
The results of the approach will be interesting as long as, along with the teaching norm, other indices will be compared, such as working conditions or payroll level.
The comparison of the teaching rules would be devoid of logic and would represent an abuse, an attempt to manipulate, which would be transmitted that the teachers in Romania work below the average of Europe, without providing an overview of the various educational systems.
The speech of the minister and the theater of Ionescu
If we still opt for the middle path, wouldn't it be appropriate for the other aspects to be the media from the European Union? “Do you find something wrong with that? I didn't say the most.”
Solidarity teachers are asked in times of crisis. The teachers were and are solidarity with the educational system: they accepted the return to the chairs, despite the fact that they were not offered what was promised with the end of the strike. The freezing of the salaries of the budget was also accepted.
But to say that you reform the educational system, that you care about the welfare of students and acute teachers and shortcomings in the educational system to add other shortcomings, it is too much.
Insisting that teachers are paid for eight hours a day, the Minister of Education and Research provides a margin that he can interpret. During this speech, the threat is in his power to impose the teachers to spend eight hours a day in schools.
His statements prove that he would implement this aspect if he could, but the infrastructure is light away from his desire reforming. Instead, it uses the speech about the eight hours in a way that would have better suited in Ionesco's theater: reducing the norm and for “good teachers”: “from those 8 hours we can relieve 2 hours so that they do not do the additional, bureaucratic activities”.
All this under the conditions in which the new law of the pre-university education system clearly establishes that the teaching-learning-evaluation norm is 18 hours a week and that, under certain conditions, it can be reduced to 16 hours per week.
About school scholarships
One last aspect, regarding the scholarships granted to the students. According to the completions subsequent to the publication of the governance program, there will be two categories of scholarships: “merit scholarships, provided a minimum average of 9, for no more than 15% of a class, and social scholarships”.
Thus, the Olympic Excellence Scholars (I and II) and the technological scholarship disappear, and the merit scholarships will no longer be granted “for at least 30% of the students in each high school and high school in a pre-university education unit”, as established by Law no.198/2023.
Therefore, the rules are modified at the end of the game. How will a student endeavor a year who endeavored for a year will be placed in the first 30% of the students in the class, and according to the new standards there will be no stock market? But an Olympic student who, according to the results obtained in the 2024-2025 school year should have obtained exchanges of Olympic excellence? This manifests the “best interest” granted to the Romanian students?
The situation is tragic
Despite the vehement critics in the public space, keeping the post -December ministerial tradition, teachers are promised to be better. Does anyone still believe in promises better? What we know for sure is the fact that the measures announced will be worse, for both teachers and students.
The disappointment is cruel, reported on the horizon of the company's expectation when the name of the future Minister of Education and Research was found.
Many have thought: “Finally, someone to represent our interests, a minister as there were few!” However, the differentiation between the person occupying a position and its depersonalization with the position is not a novelty.
Ernst H. Kantorowicz wrote a classic work about the two bodies of the king. By keeping the proportions, we can say that the minister becomes another with the occupancy of the portfolio. Closer to this day, a work worth considering in this context is the one signed by Theodor Paleologu, the pathologies of power.
Referring to those who hold the power, the Romanian intellectual remembers the effect of the mirror that increases the good or evil of each person. With the thought of this aspect and taking into account the educational policy of the majority of the ministers of education in the last decades, I tend to believe that within the Ministry of Gen. Berthelot even there are certain mirrors that only increase the less good parts.
Until the opposite proof, teachers and students remain with the certainty that the Minister of Education and Research has the mission to sanction, not to represent them.
In vain it is stated in various reports that certain aspects of the education system “become a risk of national security” and that “the role of the teacher in society must be rethought, in order to encourage the best graduates of higher education to become teachers.”
At the moment, it seems that priority is to encourage teachers to identify professional alternatives. Who imagines that one of the most ambitious programs to reform the education system in Romania has any chance of success in the context of worsening the working conditions within it?
In fact, the situation is tragic. Until 2030, when the status of the teachers is supposed to reach unmoved quotas, many of the good teachers will leave the system, and many others will vote for antisystem. And then it will be too late to be able to remedy any look.
The text was initially published on contributors.ro.
