“Educated Romania”– again in the spotlight

Education in Romania is in need of profound reform, agree Romanian politicians.

Roxana Vasile, 06.12.2019, 20:14

In 2014, when he won his first term as president of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, who used to be a teacher himself, promised to launch a national strategy entitled “Educated Romania”. Only put to a public debate at the end of last year, that is four years into his term, the document has already been taken apart by critics. The strategy is so vague, the latter say, that it proposes no concrete solutions. In other words, whats even worse that the current state of the Romanian education system is the lack of any clear and coherent measures to tackle a situation that has been deteriorating for some years now.

The most recent example came this week in the form of the PISA test results carried out once every three years around the world by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. At these tests, 15-year-old Romanian pupils got the poorest scores in the last nine years in maths, reading and science, with 44% of them being in fact “functional illiterates”. The reaction of the current minister for education and research, the Liberal Party member Monica Anisie, was shocking in its carelessness; she said the PISA test results are not a reason for concern. She was quickly contradicted by her boss, the Liberal prime minister Ludovic Orban, and by president Klaus Iohannis.

In a pres conference on Thursday, the latter said in fact that the performance of Romanian pupils is a matter that should be given serious thought, which is why he initiated “Educated Romania”. The project, he explained, is still in public debate, with the conclusions to be presented to political parties, whose support is needed to implement any measures in this respect. Blaming everyone or posting news on Facebook, as some have tried to do, helps no one, said Klaus Iohannis in a veiled response to, among others, a social media post by the former prime minister and European commissioner Dacian Ciolos, who believes the president should initiate a new national pact for education that would provide, apart from an obligatory percentage of the GDP for education, an agreement between political parties to keep an education minister in place for at least five years, regardless of how often governments come and go in this time span and of their political orientation.

These things should make us all think, not in an electioneering way, but in the sense in which the system should undergo profound reform, replied Klaus Iohannis. Except that, after this years elections for the European Parliament and the presidential elections, 2020 will see the local and parliamentary elections.