Starting School without Schools

This September 15 was another lame start for a new academic year to tens of thousands of teachers and millions of schoolchildren.

Trade unions organized protests on this day traditionally opening the academic year, asking for salary raises, while president Traian Basescu showed a day before his confidence that no such protest would occur.

For years teachers wait for salary raises, while the funds to fix the schools’ buildings are never enough to do the job. Schools are always mirroring the status of the larger society. Six decades ago, Armand Calinescu, taking over as an interim minister for national education, said in 1938 that he found an institution "in disarray."

"There was a lack of authority and a wrong direction the education was heading to; these were dangerous facts for the future because they damaged the natural development of the young."

Calinescu’s words back then are just as valid today.

Under the pressure of constant political bickering among the coalition parties the quality of education in Romania continued to drop.

Professors and elementary school tutors are humiliated by the low level of the salaries they receive, while their protests are constantly ignored by the Government and the Presidency.

Liberal PM Calin Popescu Tariceanu failed to sack the democrat minister of education Mihai Hardau this summer, when exam papers were sold on the free market prior to examination days.

Now Hardau tells us schools can go ahead and open for business even when they do not comply with the sanitary requirements. Hardau’s take was that the health authority in charge with checking up the schools was headed by a liberal, hence more inclined to spoil his authority with making unsubstantiated claims.

Basescu too was discontent. With the trade unionists. Everything else to him got a positive spin: the 30 percent schools still not repaired were to him the 70 percent schools already repaired. And the protests Friday for the very low salaries were just an opportunity to start negotiating a raise till Christmas.

The naked truth today, 17 years after the demise of communism, is that we are down to 14,000 schools, from 30,000 back in 1990, and up to one million illiterate people.

We are thus not that far from opening the academic year in a country with no schools, students or teachers at all.