Romania’s gifted children

Romania lacks an adequate system to identify and nurture its gifted children.

Christine Leșcu, 09.12.2015, 13:54

Children can
show signs of exceptional creativity and intelligence from a very early age and
parents pay attention to any sign that may indicate their child is particularly
gifted in the arts or sciences. In school, children should be able to develop
their native talents, provided these talents have been identified. This is how
things stand in theory, but in practice the situation is very different in
Romania. Programmes to test and identify gifted children are defective and
there are no official statistics in this respect. The Gifted Education
non-governmental association has conducted its own survey, which is however not
representative, as admitted by the association’s president, the mathematician
Florian Colceag:

Generally
speaking, no nation-wide surveys have been conducted, only surveys that used
samples of up to one thousand people. So, the data we have supplied can be
challenged. Around 4% of the children we surveyed have above average
intelligence, that is an IQ of over 120. With Chinese children, the percentage
is 6% and the world average is 2%. But
these figures are fairly debatable, because it all depends on the type of test
given and the indicators used. For instance, a few years ago, a team of
Norwegian psychologists tested children in the rural areas and on the outskirts
of the city. They tested ordinary people, with no education and who had made no
intellectual effort in their life. Their result was an average IQ of 89,
compared with the world average of 100.

Other factors
that may influence the result of testing can also be encountered in other
countries, not just in Romania, says Florian Colceag:

The IQ revealed
by testing does not always match the individual’s success in life. There are
people with a high IQ level who have not achieved anything important
professionally and have left no visible mark in their domains. There are very
intelligent people who work as taxi drivers. For example, 50% of the people
tested and shown to be smarter than average according to a survey carried out
by universities in Connecticut, the US, do not have exceptional careers. This
is why I’m reticent to say that these statistics are relevant.

Statistics may
not be relevant, but they can be a starting point for the development of
educational programmes designed to help children develop their potential.
Unfortunately, this aspect is almost entirely neglected by the Romanian
authorities and the legislation in the field is precarious, says Robert Florea,
the coordinator of the Bucharest Centre for Educational Resources and
Assistance:

Unfortunately,
there is no special interest in this area. I don’t know how things stand at the
Education Ministry, but there is certainly no concern with this idea at the
level of school inspectorates. Neither does the legislation cover the area
properly. The current education law only has one section and one article with
five paragraphs dealing with children capable of high performances. The law
does not use the term gifted. One piece of legislation from 2007 included a
few provisions referring to the identification of such children and the
allocation of human resources to deal with them. Unfortunately, there is no
interest in this matter today.

The law on the
education of young people capable of high performances, adopted in 2007, was
passed at the initiative of professor Florian Colceag:

The National
Centre for Differentiated Training should have existed since 2007, with the aim
of creating a school network. It does exist in name, but has no staff, no
offices and no budget. No political party has ever been interested in
identifying children with great intellectual potential. This institute should
create educational alternatives for the development of children’s personalities
and for maximising their potential. This alternative form of education would
not measure performance, but the progress of children in their fields of
interest, because no child can be passionate about everything at the same time.
When a child makes a significant progress in a certain field and is passionate
about something, this is something extraordinary, but this requires
individualised and personalised education.

In the absence
of governmental programmes, parents resort to various private initiatives to
test and train their gifted children. The only children who benefit from
special training are the winners of the international science and language
competitions known as the Olympiads, but only in order to train for these
competitions. As for other children, we asked Robert Florea what he thinks the
government should do to discover the country’s gifted children:

It is an issue
that needs to be tackled at the level of the entire system, with the help of
experts. The latter should develop the testing tools and identify the
representative sample nation-wide. Right now, unfortunately, there is no
interest in this at an institutional level. Nobody has ever been interested in
discovering these children, although they should. If we look at the
participants in international Olympiads, we see that many have left the
country. Romania should create the necessary conditions for their development,
but first we must identify these gifted children, something which requires the
creation of an entire new system.

To conclude, we
might say that the issue of gifted children in Romania is not just about
developing a child’s individual potential, but also about the social, economic
and cultural future of the country.