In the last 30
years Romania’s education system has been faced with a great number of
challenges. Cabinet after Cabinet promised to implement wide-reaching reforms
to ensure basic nationwide education. A 2018 report of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) under the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) revealed significant drops in reading,
mathematics and sciences across Romania. An even more worrying piece of
information is that 44% of Romanian pupils have trouble understanding what they’re
reading, making for one of the highest rates of functional illiteracy in the
European Union. In 2015, Romania had one of the EU’s highest school dropouts,
19.5%. Although it did drop to 15.3% in 2019, it is still one of the highest
rates compared to the EU average. The hard reality behind these numbers has as
much to do with the particular difficulties faced by underprivileged
communities, as with an overall misconception about the education process and
the general learning experience.
If anything, the
COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some of the deepest-running flaws in Romania’s
education level: severe underfunding, poor access to education in rural and
remote areas, the lack of a transparent and centralized system for evaluating
teaching staff, in addition to the exodus of Romania’s best-qualified alumni
abroad, have over the years put a dent in Romanian education, with the promise
of reforms remaining no more than an election slogan. Understaffed, undertrained
and underpaid, teachers in underprivileged communities lack the means to
provide even the most basic form of education. NGOs sometimes reach out to the
authorities for support, who bring up budget limitations. Whenever the message
does come across and finds some echo, state assistance is either not enough or
inadequately provided. Marija-Liisa Tehnunen, the rector of Dimitrie Cantemir
Christian University of Bucharest and an internationally acclaimed Finnish education
expert, believes that any successful reform in education should start with the
elementary system.
Marja-Liisa
Tenhunen is Rector of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University of Bucharest. You
can listen to the full interview here.