Any analysis of the Romanian education system is tentative from the outset. Legislative changes are quick, sudden, not discussed in parliamentary committees, the press, struck by a certain blindness to topics that do not cause an explosion of opinions of the general public (reading is no longer a problem), cannot digest them in time. before anything changes, if that’s what we’re talking about, even though we don’t think so. If during the year several video materials are broadcast in PRIME time on television once a season, the general public is alarmed by the “disaster” in education (always the same, monolithically: violence, bullying, unsanitary toilets, teachers overwhelmed by the situation, technology and skills required for the faculty, students who mature early in terms of excesses, psychotropics, even for promiscuous consumption in recent times – only the Tate brothers were not coincidentally known among Romanian teenagers before they became characters of worldwide fame, however ephemeral), the system reacts internally: anxiety (n )to the government’s decision still rises to patch holes here and there, another order of the minister is launched into the zenith, an anonymous set of “advisors” and “inspectors” from the Ministry of Education and subordinate bodies in the territory is politically changing. National strategies are proposed with a pompous name, short or too long timelines, thick reporting and zero effectiveness. In moments of despair and confrontation with the lack of own decisions and a clear identity, the higher bureaucratic apparatus acts, erasing mistakes from memory, renaming the names of institutions in the operational organizational structure, including the Ministry of Education. “When this and that happened, my name was different. The past belongs to another person, in relation to which – keep in mind! – I have nothing to share. Someone else is on the ballot, not me, sorry.” We are talking about a familiar Kafkaesque universe, but presided over not by an absent deity, an obscure element, but by some shows with the faces and skills of Daniel Prepeleac from his first stage, before he triumphantly pulled the strings of the devils.

In the bowels of the system, where life pulsates in its slow, circular and monotonous cycle, nothing changes except the biological. We grow old, and others with equally well-known habits take our place. Such is life and we will sigh for a long time, perfect cattle. Fate cannot be reversed from its inexorable course. Where does this reserve of fatality and satiety come from? Most likely from apathy, indifference and an empty mountain of ignorance. In a thicket of laws, expanded and then repealed, supplemented and changed, twisted and lost in a thicket of confused numbers, logic exists only to be sabotaged. However, among so many relative and meaningless fads, whose presence or absence of meaning no one resents, as trivial as the direct result, some educational strategies are also sneaking in, the consequences of which are deeply damaging to Romanian education. We will discuss one of these measures later, before briefly introducing the problem.

Some time ago, thanks to the leniency and genius of those who govern us, teachers were allowed to conduct professional retraining programs. This measure was not accidental because, given the large number of relatively recently merged schools and the demographic crisis that Romania began to experience after 2000 and from which we have not yet come out, the risk of unemployment in public education has already appeared. You have been a teacher for decades and close the school due to lack of students just as you are fast approaching retirement, and there are schools like this in many other “historical regions”. The countryside was devastated by this disaster of the “governorship of governors” and the need to feed the family by working “outside”, where if life is not ideal, then “it is, however, different”. Where do the children, future students, come from if they are born in other places or do not appear at all? University professor Vasyl Getseu’s January 2023 articles on the recently completed Romanian population census are readily available and statistically confirm the phenomenon we are talking about. To prevent unemployment due to the disappearance of pre-university education departments, professional reconversion was invented. Some teachers will be outraged and stand up in protest: “Where did you get that idea?” I went from being a music teacher to a very good math teacher because I felt the need to change because of age. I began to limit myself, and I could not remain stuck in a narrow way of existence in which I no longer found myself.” The profession as a kind of marriage, exhausted and begun in another form, seems the noblest excuse. In fact, the expectation of the disappearance of the work of a teacher of music, religion, technological education (and practical application) or drawing prompts many teachers to start a second (or third) faculty at the age of 40-45, where they can get the right to transfer to the position of a primary school teacher in their locality or in mathematics school in the nearest city. That is if these positions are not on vacation at the same school where we take vacation. If the untainted thrill of knowledge played a real role in the whole equation, then it is not clear why teachers in the process of reconversion rush to get a diploma of a teacher of mathematics or a teacher in private faculties at the end of the platoon and in the faculty. quality conditions of education imposed by reduced frequency or distance form of education. Why so much haste and why in these modest study conditions, if not because of the need not to lose my seat soon and, as a result, my job or source of income and livelihood? Of course, the question is rhetorical. If the legitimate administrators of the Romanian education system did not think about the educational paradigm in a permanent mode of austerity and drastic cuts in the education budget (we are not so smart with the budgets of the secret services, although we do not know exactly what they use for us as a nation: only no one in their right mind does not believe in it alone, with our dubious human and material potential, we would face an invasion or a hybrid war with an enemy from the east), then reducing the class size to 15-16 students would save some jobs in the system and at the same time increase the quality of the educational act, the teacher allocates, basically, more time and energy for the student he works with. But nothing like that: there are still 25-30 students in the classes. If we had numerically rich groups, probably in Romania, a country with a population ten times smaller than that of India, we would have crammed 35-40 students into a class, like right after 1980, when the radiators started freezing and the food on the menu . There is no denying the principle of our political elites: in the vast and complex fields of education and health care, which cost so much, we are stingy and stingy. A student and a patient “spend” state money, and a “cannon” with construction, cleaning, sanitary, and medical equipment — yes, it’s something else. Here we are, without a mask and without pity.

And what does all this have to do with the completion of the teacher’s professional conversion? We no longer slide into useless retreats. There are a lot of them, and here’s why: let’s assume, strictly within the limits of immediate reality, that you study at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of the University of Bucharest and for some hardly justified reason you want to become a young teacher of mathematics not in your village, commune or city, which are “dead” , but even in the capital of Romania. Fortunately, due to the shortage of mathematics teachers in recent years, work will be found, but this is a temporary state. Now for the mandatory steps to complete: after making sure we have a license, a master’s degree, and completed psychopedagogical modules 1 and 2, we take the written exam to enter the system. We also excel in mandatory audits. Finally, we become teachers in a theoretically decent high school and have to improve practically and must pass the final exam if we want to stay “indefinitely” in the system. When we arrive at the office, we meet our mathematician colleague, a 45-50-year-old student who taught technology education at the same school two years ago. In the meantime, he completed a “evening” conversion program at a university faculty in Tirgoviste, Pitesti, Craiova or Braila. He held the post for twenty years, and when he transferred to the mathematics department, he retained, by law, his teaching degree from the old discipline he had taught. He believed that being a math teacher was “safer” than what he had done before – a reasonable reason and an external motivation, to be honest. Keep reading and commenting on Contribuotrs.ro