In the ninth book of Odyssey, Odysseus tells the Phaeacians how, upon arriving at the island of the Cyclops, he kidnaps the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, blinding him. When Polyphemus asks Odysseus to name a brave hero who will dare to oppose him and hasten his end, the cunning and endlessly ironic Odysseus replies that his name is Nobody. This Nobody does not repeat itself in many historical moments, smaller or larger.

In a mythical land where nothing seems to matter, nobody is found everywhere, but seems to be concentrated in the lower strata of society, shunned by the light and concern of their fellows on the upper rungs of the social ladder, where they are discussed in terms of Nothing and less Nobody . We spend our lives between Nothing and Nobody, on the edge of Europe. The state system of pre-university education is subject to the same cultural, economic and, no less important, social pressures. And here there is a category of teachers whom our “leaders”, the political masters of Romania (now there is at least one political party that, although it is running in the elections and claims to be nationalist, but loudly supports, as in the darkest anti-democratic conspiracies, that Romania is controlled remotely “foreigners” – only the politicians of this fiery parliamentary party miraculously escaped the spell of political telepathy), treat them like nobody. They have the general name “substitutes” or “temporary workers”.

Who are they? Long ago, in the era of sad memories of late Causism, the substitute teacher made his presence felt as a necessary “fringe” of the regime, partly due to fluctuations in the number of students, hours per subject, reserved or vacant seats after the beginning of the academic year, medical leaves and vacations child care, but also the young teacher’s desire to live at a different “address” than the one he received, due to the power of the state to use an educated person. resource as he wants, “state appropriations”. The mud of the homeland and the exhausting road, in the miserable conditions of everyday life in 1980-1989 did not correspond to the ambitions and desire for liberation of many teachers. But 1989 came, a year of structural changes in Romania. A serious, lucid history or study with data and critical interpretations of the changes that took place in the first post-communist decade regarding faculty mobility, going beyond legislative changes, we do not think has been written in Romania. It is natural that this happens, because textbooks and curricula can be talked about abstractly until complete exhaustion, but about professional quality specific those who reformed the education system after 1989, especially middle management, have been talking for a long time after the fact, full of inaccuracies: it gave only modest and often poor results. In general, the substitute has become the workhorse of many changes in public education in Romania.

Why are there quite a lot of substitutes in the current state education system, about 20% of teachers? Here we can talk about poor management of human resources, starting from the goals proposed by the decision-makers to the strategies for their implementation. It has been known for several generations that there are state faculties (for now, let’s ignore the private ones) that train mainly teachers. It is no less true, however, that apart from an honest analysis related to professions, jobs and average income of graduates, we can assume that, for example, foreign language departments are dumping human resources on the market, which could be anything, from translators without simbra, teachers after schooljournalists onlinewhile loyal travelers, hostess, video chat, but also the traditional unemployed. Many social sciences and humanities faculties in Romania have spent years selling students the illusion that they can be anything. It would also be fair to say that no one forces us to believe what is being said under our noses. This generous and vague offer means nothing more than the fact that the market is either unstable or not developed enough to outline a safe professional profile in the medium, if not possibly long term. Faculties sell disadvantage as a quality in a “dynamic world in which we have to face challenges”. As if the average physics graduate, supposedly a science enthusiast, dreams of being a salesperson or an economist in a company. The court decision is also valid for a graduate of biological, chemical or physical education and sports. Practically, if public universities had not plunged into the mirage of fantastic figures for tuition, half of which is taxed, because this is how private profits are made on public infrastructure and related budgetary personnel, then the student would not hesitate to jump into the waves without a minimum of security. If the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Education reported and limited by law the right of state universities to no longer provide education to hundreds of physicists, thousands of doctors, half of whom cannot be accepted for vacant positions in the state medical system (this year we are talking about the residency exam, where about 10,000 graduates fought for 5,000 relevant jobs), thousands of journalists, sociologists, chemists, hundreds of experts in communication, political science, etc. year after year, then we definitely would not have such a large-scale situation when, on the one hand, emigration from all social and professional spheres, not only citizens with secondary education, on the other hand, graduates of higher education work in somewhat related fields his academic training. However, public universities did whatever they wanted, according to the autonomy they enjoyed by law. Private universities cannot be evaluated to the same extent, because their student is otherwise as misinformed as a student at public universities about his professional prospects, evaluated statistically, assuming that he is paying the amount of money he risks losing by failing to integrate ( please feel free) in the job market, although it is true that public schools charge at least as high fees. A preliminary conclusion is that, in addition to the poor training and questionable quality standards of Romanian higher education graduates – an issue that employers in Romania have been complaining about for some time, who repeatedly talk about retraining and teachingIn addition, they are often deceived by their own gullibility and immaturity. Fortunately or not, given the demographic decline of the last decades in terms of the active permanent population, the number of births and successive waves of emigration to the rich countries of the European Union and beyond, the university game of “giving degrees to anyone, just to pay” is almost over. Soon, the hunt for buyers will reach crisis proportions, and some will be forced to lock the door, sending the degree sellers home, if they haven’t already.

What does this phenomenon have to do with the substitute teacher? Main. The number of students provided for in the form of budget places at state faculties, which prepare, among other things, graduates who will be able to continue their teaching career, should be correlated with the actual number of vacant places, and how many in our case – not. in the pre-university system. Otherwise, we annoyingly repeat the deadlock above. We graduate a thousand graduates, not a tenth of whom find work at the national level in the public education system of Romania. The number of teachers who work on a substitute or on a position (work for an indefinite period) should be correlated with the number of students per year of the bachelor’s cycle. Does this happen? In no case. Faculties put thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of candidates on the labor market, whom the same faculties are afraid to discuss in realistic terms of employment, with an abacus in front of them. The market raises questions, but the “we provide bachelor’s and master’s” business is moving forward unstoppably.

But let’s go to the level of a graduate who wants to become, why not?, a teacher of Romanian language and literature. From the very beginning, we assume that he did not find another job in accordance with his studies. The sum of those who become teachers is said to be from calling, currently relatively small. The real situation is complex: either there are school subjects in which a hundred candidates epistemically face each other for ten vacancies at the level of a large city such as, for example, Bucharest, or there are others in which we have several candidates for an equal or higher number places than the competition (in the subjects of biology, physics, but even mathematics). This contradictory situation is the result of poor management and poor forecasting of the education system. Fortunately, the system can afford to raise the retirement age of teachers past 65, proof that we are still living off the skills of socialist-educated generations. We skip this detail because simply finding it doesn’t really solve anything. Regret, resignation and pity are superfluous in this case. The graduate takes the entrance exam to the education system. He becomes a teacher not after graduating from a specialized faculty, which only guarantees him the right to work as a teacher, but after this exam, which is organized every summer in Romania. The exam is conducted both written and oral. Young teachers do quite well on the individual open lessons test, which counts as a smaller percentage of the final grade, and their grades are on average higher than the written grades. The written examination consists neither of a subject studied in college, nor always of a subject related to study in previous grades of secondary or high school. It is the invention of minds that one might euphemistically say do not know what they are actually testing. A university professor would consider a pre-university position exam to be a dry textbook exercise, uninspired and limited by cultural and scientific horizons. An experienced teacher of pre-university training, who has many years of experience in the system, sees it as a guarantee of the quality of education and approved training, but nothing more, although the final exams and the second degree reproduce the model of the entrance exam to study. The experience in the classroom, working face-to-face with students, is something completely different. A principal who has been through the system a lot would tell you that this exam for creating teachers is invalid or secondary: how many times have they not found themselves after the exam with great teachers on paper, but who have enormous difficulties, if not really insurmountable, training and the effectiveness of the transmitted content, communication with parents? It is true that school directors and lyceums have dreamed for years of being allowed to hire only teachers, according to the selection grids they invented, but this hope is linked to a Romanian risk, not a Danish or Dutch one: perhaps the school will be filled with relatives, friends and other behind-the-scenes arrangements of those who organize this contest. So it’s great that this investigation, however dubious it may be, as well as the robust results in terms of efficacy, should take place from above existing study units Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro