One of the problems, not even properly defined, and, as a result, all the more difficult to solve, in our pre-university education is the training of teachers who already work in the public education system. Since 1989, after a scientific justification that can only be assumed, since its traces seem to have completely disappeared from the memory of contemporaries, erased by the waves of history, the teacher passed the three stages of training necessary for an increase in salary or stability in the position: a final exam education, second degree and first degree Retired or near-retired public education teachers today can tell us, even if they only caught the last decade of Causism as teachers, that it was not as easy as it is today to “make your grades.” At one time, the number of places was limited, and an initial selection test was required before the actual tests and preparation for the final written examination began. Socialist education, having reached its eightieth stage of strict budgetary austerity, disposed of the resources of the available staff with an assumption of avarice, overcrowded classrooms and stopped building schools. The difficulty of the exams at any level was adequate. The professional orientation was moving “down” towards production, the intellectual proletariat was in a certain remission, manual work was still, in the era of the third industrial revolution, digital, which will explode globally after 1990, a piece of resistance to the regime, an anachronism and technologically superior in large portions. A teacher began his career between the ages of 20 and 25 and could hope to earn all his teaching degrees by demonstrating persistence, increased efficiency and dedication to his career, with at least fifteen years of proven daily experience in the department.

After 1989, against the background of the economic irrelevance of the old organization of the public education system, which only after 1996 began to undergo various shock therapies, the period of obtaining degrees was gradually shortened. With a little work and ordinary intelligence, a pre-university teacher can even now get his teaching degree in a maximum of 10 years. It is true that the same situation was found, with not always great results, also in the academic environment, where from the general state of “blocking of publications” in the 80s, when we not infrequently met 50-year-old teachers who wrote Among the Books, there was a whirlwind of university professors under the age of 30 and authors of books that are not only worn but impossible to find in bookstores, public libraries, or on the Internet. It is not difficult to guess that this is the state that prevailed from the last third of the 90s until about 2010, when the classic themes of academic fraud consisting of plagiarism, that is, bachelors, masters and doctorates, bought or stolen in the form of final papers from one and another Moreover, the explosion of graduate students and doctors of science of all kinds occurred during the period of maximum fertility of university corruption. There is an inversely proportional relationship between the number of issued diplomas and the quality of the public education system: the fewer documents confirming graduation, the more serious the selection of graduates (reciprocity is the same). However, the attraction to academic titles of certain social categories in Romania in recent decades also stems from the statistical avarice supported by the socialist state, with which the Chausius economic model produced “white-collar workers”. Many of those already employed and mature after 1989 graduated from universities (public or private, full-time, part-time or distance, it doesn’t matter) and hung the titles on their business cards because they were symbolic assets of great social value in their lives. young people, but also a means of concealing the reality that many of those who arrived – easy to say how, hard to prove how – into government and economic positions relatively recently met their fate, even if for a short time, with standard factory work eighties and factories. The mediocre effectiveness of social integration (existing jobs) due to easy access to university degrees after 2007, the year of European integration, will soon be followed by pessimistic academic articles, if it hasn’t already happened.

Returning to the didactic degrees in the pre-university system, the first thing to mention is related to the obvious logic – obvious because it makes sense only in the economic and political paradigm of the time – this training in the Chaus years. If the state tightened its belts because the dictator and/or his minions wanted it (how rational this step was considered in December 1989), then it was quite normal for the education system to save on the training of active teaching staff, increasing the complexity of education. get access to the first degree Fewer teachers with optional degrees, more savings from the state budget, money that could go to finance the industry. At the moment, in the European market economy, where an employed labor force, (highly) qualified in terms of training, is the most valuable resource of society, the logic is the opposite: the more teachers with diplomas, the more competent the graduates will be at the end of each cycle of education, which in no way does not mean lowering the requirements for each degree exam. In any case, our state is not in the habit of spending financial resources on education, so the possible fear of inflation of teachers with a first diploma should not attract attention at the moment. As a result, we offer a critical analysis of mentoring and learning in the teaching career, ranging from salary scales, new perspectives and skills in pedagogical and didactic issues, scientific information available along the way.

For a pre-university teacher, work experience – a separate variable – has the same importance as the teaching degree obtained in the exam. The younger the teacher when he receives his first education, the closer his salary is to the salary of a beginner. The difference is several hundred lei, which is worth something significant in terms of interest only from the employee’s point of view. It is obvious that the state can bear the difference in cost of 500 lei between a 35-40-year-old teacher with a first degree and one with only a graduation certificate of the same age, but with equal experience. The difference in amount can reach 1500 lei, but not more, between veteran teachers at the end of their careers, but with teaching degrees at opposite poles (definitely against the first degree). In public education, there is no individual salary negotiation, only salary scales that are set according to a single criterion, similar to the Chausius criterion in the 1980s: reduce human resource costs as much as possible. Furthermore, although the origin of the teacher grade divide is related to the differential motivation of teachers and their training according to their particular competencies, the reality is rather one of wage control, not above this accounting category. Without questioning the need for differentiated pay, we do not understand why the emphasis is still on graduation, second and first degrees of education, since other formulas for the financial motivation of teachers can be found in the public system. We could have a decent starting salary for any teacher at two net median salaries, and the really high salaries go to the minority who demonstrate with indisputable results that they deserve a raise over periods of time. Under current conditions, a novice teacher who can barely support himself in a big city where he lives in a rented house earns as much as a teacher with an advanced degree, with the advanced degrees adding at most 20% to 30% of the salary, taking into account equal seniority. The prospect of wage regulation in pre-university public education is stuck in the Caustic economy of 1980-1989, with the difference that now the state has internalized maintenance with the power of “the fat one standing in the saddle of the thin one” – the experts know who we mean – no promising in the near future nothing more than what he is already doing.

As for the new knowledge and attitudes that a teacher must learn from one diploma exam to another, the discussion here risks easily slipping into despair and jeremiad. Each specialist can appreciate the difference in difficulty that exists, for example, in a mathematical discipline between the final written exam and the second degree. What is sought in the assessment for the second degree as a proof higher than the one to be completed is only a few more complex mathematical concepts and tricks, at the end of theoretical high school, a real specialization that indicates a slightly wider field of knowledge. The same situation applies to the didactic, methodical and pedagogical part. Too often – and this fact can be easily generalized without risking a mistake – there is a gulf between them what the average student can learn Romanian at school and what is required of the teacher so that he knows in these diploma examinations, which are designed either for exemplary and unrealistic students, or for ideal and non-existent teachers, the psychological predictions of those who write the subjects. The detachment from the potential and pressing needs of Romanian society cannot be bigger or more audacious than this. Why should a foreign language teacher who teaches basic or intermediate elements of grammar and vocabulary in an elementary school or gymnasium know – on the example of (old-time) commentaries on Romanian literature for a bachelor’s exam – several works of American or French postmodernism, if this teacher never teaches students, with whom he has to work every day, the literature of this language? Even if he taught at an elite national college, such refined intellectual delights would be out of reach for a capable and intelligent student at that institution. Why does it require great theoretical solutions, extremely thick in terms of conventional terminology, to teach and assess, if the characteristics and level of the learner, how they are presented in school, fully and completely parallel to the theoretical schemes proposed by pedagogues and methodologists, experts in the field of educational science, whose outstanding discoveries have no empirical basis, demonstrated and publicly recognized in Romanian society? These are not even rhetorical questions, but rather alarm signals. Why the creators of didactic and scientific content develop such unrealistic evaluation methods, we can only guess, but we leave it to the reader to imagine the reasons for the lack of efficiency and common sense.

But let’s assume for now that written exams for teaching degrees are carefully thought out. They test and correctly differentiate skills at different levels of intensity. Students have excellent teachers if they pass the exams offered by the system. Even in this case, it is still not clear why almost the same scientific information, differing only in the complexity and pedantry of the subjects, is covered from the final to the first degree. what do you mean a teacher develops from 20-25 to 35-40 years. In most cases, the assessment is not fair stationary in terms of content innovation between earned teaching degrees, but it it is also recorded on a scale of decadesas if scientific knowledge, even if it is applied at the primary or secondary level in the pre-university system, is not far from the frontier of knowledge, would stay put. Even this one is not problematic considering the preparation daily teaching staff. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro