Every year,
Romania compels worldwide recognition for the exceptional results obtained by
Romanian high school students at the international mathematics, physics,
chemistry, astronomy or computer science olympiads. But those teenagers account
for a small percentage of the total number of those whom the country will have
to rely on in the near future. According to the PISA tests, Romanian teenagers
who are now 15 years old get low marks in mathematics, reading and sciences as
compared to those who are now 9 years old. In other words, Romania has obtained
the poorest results of the last 9 years in the OECD periodical test. According
to that evaluation, 44% of Romanian school students do not understand what they
read and cannot perform basic arithmetic operations, functional illiteracy
being alarming. Romania ranks 47th out of 79 countries, which is
quite relevant. The results of the PISA tests confirm what has been said for
years, namely that the Romanian education system is a complete mess and the
successive education ministers have done nothing but take certain measures,
some of them catastrophic. The reaction of liberal Education and Research
Minister Monica Anisie is actually shocking. She believes that the PISA tests
are not the expression of individual performances and that the participants’
involvement was not full since there was no stake. We must not worry, Monica
Anisie said. But we should – said a journalist in an article recalling that
Romania is blood poisoned by emigration, a major workforce crisis and now by
functional illiteracy. In the journalist’s view, the authorities should worry,
but not in a barren way; they should make rapid and major changes in an
obsolete system which seems to run counter to the ongoing digital revolution,
with some less trained teachers and many
disinterested students. Obviously, the quality of education in Romania needs to
be increased not by cosmetic measures but by substantial measures -says Prime
Minister Ludovic Orban. In 2014, when he got his first mandate as president of
Romania, Klaus Iohannis, a teacher himself at the time, promised a strategy
entitled Educated Romania. The strategy was submitted to public debate in
late 2018, that is after four years of his first mandate, being criticized. It
is so vague that it will provide no concrete solution, the critics said; the
turmoil it has triggered rather than the solutions illustrates quite a troubled
political and social environment. In other words, the lack of clear and
coherent measures to straighten out the situation is more serious than the
Romanian school students’ results at the PISA tests.
