The incident at the capital’s national college “Ion Creangă” a few days ago, which resulted in a full-scale murder attempt, as a 16-year-old student threatened a teacher with a knife. premises of a state educational institution, during a lesson one can only fear for the safety of one’s life, caused a lot of stormy comments on the network. There was no spontaneous strike by teachers either in the country or in Bucharest. Education unions have not officially reported any immediate civil protest beyond verbal expressions of outrage. Education unions have been campaigning for years only for pay rights, and a substantial increase, not just a few tens of lei below the annual rate of inflation or so, happens once every few decades when the government, backed by a sizeable parliamentary majority, decides whether they like it or not, it is completely random and unpredictable.

For years, if not more than a decade, incidents of violence in schools have increased exponentially. If earlier, as a remnant of the communist regime, the prevailing impression was that teachers behaved aggressively with students, now the situation has changed in such a way that it is diametrically opposed to the past. Teachers no longer hit with a three-sided ruler for the good reason that the law does not allow them to commit such barbaric acts. It is true that such rules no longer exist as functional objects of invention in modern Romanian education. The non-pedagogical actions of the past have deeply marked the mentality of the generations, which are now about 45-55 years old. Today’s adults, in turn their parents, are firmly convinced that the treatment they were subjected to in the last communist decade or in the first post-revolutionary years has continued unhindered for two or three generations to the present. Nothing could be further from the truth. It must be repeated that even then, during the communist childhood and youth, students did not have the right to punishment related to beatings, insults or forms of behavior that threatened their physical and mental health. The fact that such acts of savagery and cruelty took place, which some mature parents speak of as the rule and others as the exception, proving that opinions are divided, did not constitute the norm and acceptable didactic behavior even in the late Socialist Republic. Romania. Why did it happen the other way around? It is likely that the Romanian ethos was preserved, developed and tolerated as normal previous violent social practices. A historian, sociologist or political scientist can inform us in detail about this difficult matter. There is no point in repeating the well-known truth that Romania was the only country in the Aesthetic Bloc that overthrew the Soviet withdrawal regime, but with the participation of the majority of Romanians through collective bloodshed, to which the majority of the population passively contributed. .

As for the general state of current discipline in schools, it is deplorable. As the director of the National College “IL Caragiale” recently told us in the media, students of this prestigious higher education institution use drugs in the department or come to school in a state of drug intoxication. The situation is not yesterday, from today, agree, and is not limited to practices in elite universities. It is generalized in the entire high school system. If the petitions and conflicts that take place every week in schools were regularly made public, and not hidden in inspections or hidden in the offices of the Ministry of Education, as is too often the case, the majority of the Romanian population with the right to vote would be faced with a fait accompli, worryingly: their children are not safe in public schools at this historic moment. Acts of violence occur, some serious, most minor (but who decides?), every day. Actual absenteeism reaches an alarming level. Students aggressively talk to each other for ridiculous reasons. Teachers do not have the necessary authority and are mostly unable to deal with the barrage of disrespect and insults coming from students. Probably, an educated parent in the old days, when the students “took a push” for any indecency at a serious word, would have been stunned if he had spent even one day in any school in modern Romania: where are the teachers from the old days? days? Are the current teachers really? I would venture to say that, irritated by the increasing scale of disobedience and aggressiveness, many of them would angrily conclude: “These are not teachers anymore.” In my time there was no such thing. How is this possible?”.

This is a key question that can only be fully answered in a doctoral dissertation. Regarding the current circumstances, Basic provisions on the organization and activity of units of pre-university education, issued by Order No. 4138 of July 4, 2022, stipulates that any sanctions applied in schools take place according to the student’s condition. The ways of the Lord are perplexed when we seek them. Fortunately OM for approval of student status, with no. 4742 dated 10.08.2016 is easily available online. We read Article 15, d): “Students are prohibited from storing or consuming drugs, alcoholic beverages or prohibited substances, cigarettes, ethnobotanical substances, and participating in gambling.” Does this happen in all educational institutions in Romania, especially high schools? The reality looks different. Points i) and j) directly relate to the incident of violence at the National College “Ion Creangă”. However, we quickly come to clause (4) of Article 16, which deals with sanctions. Students may receive individual oral observation (a), private rather than public. We are forbidden to create collective justice and, of course, not in front of everyone, but carefully, safely, with infinite softness and tact. Students may also receive a written reprimand (b). Their scholarships may be canceled (c). They can be transferred in a disciplinary manner to a parallel class of the educational unit (d). Students can be warned about exclusion (e) and even exclude (f). Items (d) to (f) do not apply in primary education, and items e and f cannot be applied in compulsory education, so until the end of the Xth grade of secondary school. In Article 18, we clarify the conditions under which a written reprimand is issued, which is only a warning (1). A class council is convened, consisting of all teachers who teach in the class where the incident occurred. A protocol is drawn up with the signatures of all class teachers, principals and parents of the persons involved who are directly related and must be present (what if they refuse to participate?). This report is presented at the end of the academic year at a meeting of the pedagogical council (2). The sanction is recorded in the class catalog indicating the document number (4). In Article 26 we read as follows: ,,(1) After eight weeks or at the end of a term or an academic year, the council shall reconvene. If the student to whom the sanction referred to in Article 16, par. (4), lit. ae) demonstrates behavior without deviations for at least 8 academic weeks, until the end of the semester or academic year, the provision for lowering the grade of conduct associated with the sanction may be canceled. These stages of encounters, which are difficult to organize for adults who work eight hours a day, are intended to make it more difficult to find an incident that would warrant a warning. There are no more serious penalties than a drop in performance and possibly repetition for a Romanian student up to grade 10, at an average age of 16. Principals and teaching staff are not experts in legal matters and do not want to absurdly complicate their existence under a mountain of papers consisting of protocols, printed tables, standard written reprimands, etc., and, for the most part, inspectors. do not approve of excessive bureaucratic zeal in this regard. As a result, the written reprimand, which is a preamble to a demotion for behavior, does not occupy the center of attention in the regular school in Romania, although the incidents are increasing and do not seem to end. What makes things absurdly difficult is presence Order number. 4343/2020, dated 05/27/2020, which also includes situations of psychological violence – bullying. Some units of pre-university education approved a Operational procedure regarding psychological violence – bullying (the name of the procedure is a little longer, but I preferred to limit myself to the main data), but not all of them. Procedures are often written or completed at unit level, inspectors do not provide most standard procedures for anything that may be of interest to the school. We also have a responsible teaching staff Commission on Prevention and Elimination of Violence, Corruption and Discrimination in the School Environment and Promoting Interculturality. Anti-bullying is complemented by the Pupils’ Charter, but punishing the perpetrators is even more difficult, time-consuming and unclear, as any parent can always go to the courts, which are far more competent than a public school that does not use its own lawyer or someone officially trained in this matter (I do not intend to suggest that the post of school lawyer should be created) in the event that this ministerial order and procedures conflict with each other or are incomplete. This is how the legislative framework for punishing students who commit actions that violate the safety of their colleagues and teachers of the department in the blessed year of 2023 looks like. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro