Illiteracy has been a burden that the Romanian people have been carrying for as long as it has been known. Whether it is classical illiteracy or functional illiteracy, Romanians are at the bottom of Europe when it comes to higher education. In the interwar period more than 78% of the population was illiterate.
Almost half of the Romanian population does not understand what FOTO Adevărul teaches
The Romanian principalities and later Romania were crushed by the scourge of illiteracy. The statistics from the 19th, 20th and even 21st centuries are grim from this point of view and the conclusion is only one: education almost never seems to have been a priority for the Romanian people. And the testimonies of the era come to confirm this conclusion, with peasants who preferred children to the horns of the plow than to the bench at school.
Europe’s tailgaters in higher education
In the year 2024, illiteracy in its classic form, i.e. with individuals who do not know how to read and write, will reach a percentage of 0.8% of the population in Romania. That means we have around 135,000 illiterates. The percentage seems small, but our country is facing another form of illiteracy. It is about functional illiteracy. In other words, even though they go through school, the students and then the adults fail to understand what they are learning or what they have read. They can reproduce a memorized text, but they cannot reason from it, they do not understand the subtleties of an idea or concept, nor are they able to use the acquired knowledge in any field of activity. And from this point of view, the Romanians continue to be a people under the curse of illiteracy. According to official statistics, in the year 2024, approximately 50% of gymnasium students are functionally illiterate. And the causes are multiple and especially of a socio-economic nature, the students also admit.
“The causes of functional illiteracy are multiple, located at the intersection between the individual and society (financial situation and resources, cultural development, socio-regional context, etc.). At the individual level, attention disorders, dyslexia, intellectual deficiencies, socio-emotional deficiencies, physical/sensory/motor/somatic disabilities, deficient motivational system, language disorders contribute immensely to the development of functional illiteracy, in the absence of the necessary help to mitigate these factors. On the other hand, at the socio-economic level, poverty and unemployment hinder the normal ascent of the student, lacking the necessary resources. Another important constituent is the family situation, as the destructuring of the value system, low family support, family conflicts, family dissolution, family violence, etc. plays a vital role in the overall development of a child”, state the representatives of the County Council of Students, from Prahova, for example. At the same time, in terms of the percentage of Romanians who have completed a form of higher education, Romania ranks last in Europe with a percentage of 17.4%.
A tradition of illiteracy, among Romanians
Illiteracy has affected the Romanian population for a long time. It is not a novelty. Initially, in its classic form. In the 19th century, only a tiny fraction of the population knew how to read and write. And this in the conditions where the overwhelming majority of the population lived in the village, urbanization being reduced. With Spiru Haret’s reform, the situation improved, or rather, things took a better turn. But even so, according to the official statistics of the time, after the First World War, that is, in the 20s, about 70% of the country’s population was illiterate. In the 1930s, the percentage dropped to about 50%. The visible improvement occurred during the years of communism when illiteracy decreased drastically, towards today’s values, especially since the party wanted to eradicate the phenomenon for the “building of socialism”. After 1990, Romanians did not escape the scourge of illiteracy, the classical one being replaced by functional illiteracy, which actually flourished after the 2000s. Also according to statistics, based on a study by the Institute of Educational Sciences, in 1994, among the graduates of the secondary school only 10% were functionally illiterate. Now their percentage reaches 50%.
The children preferred to the horns of the plow, both by parents and by the authorities
The attitude towards school and education can be seen in the past of the Romanian people, especially during the formation of modern educational institutions. In the 19th century, Romania was a deeply rural country with poor and illiterate peasants. Few of them had managed to manage and implicitly access other values. It was a conservative world with its own rules that were hard to change. In addition, no part of the authorities of the time, at least until 1859, had much interest in changing them. They preferred the poor and uneducated peasants. Even after the abolition of serfdom, the peasant without elementary education remains tied to the glie, the only one from which he and his family can survive. After the boyars handed over the great estates to the tenants, the peasant continued to be a cheap and easy-to-manage labor. The uneducated peasant was not interested in sending his child to school. It was an unnecessary expense for him, and besides, he needed help with the field work. And that while survival was his only goal.
“Most of the peasants are not even interested in the children’s education and refuse to participate in the construction of school premises in their villages, even complaining that they don’t want to and asking to be left alone.(…) Children’s opinion it is quite different from that established by the urban world and even by the central power: to help with the countless labors of the fields, to be a comfort in old age. However, these duties can be carried out without too much book knowledge”, shows Constanța Vintilă Ghițulescu in “Evgheniti, ciocoi, mojici. About the faces of the first Romanian modernity 1750-1860”. Even after 1864, with the introduction of compulsory education, the peasants did their best to sabotage the education process, afraid that their children would be taken away from work and made to sit with a book in hand. That is precisely why the peasants did not give wood to the school during the winter, did not pay for the teacher and took care that the school was also demolished.
Some refused outright to send their children to school. And this state was maintained for a long time. For their part, especially until the middle of the 19th century, the conservative boyars were a real brake on the education of the masses. And that’s because they didn’t want to run out of cheap, uneducated labor on the estates. “The government is establishing Lancasterian schools in all the villages and the patriots are shouting in the diet that if the Romanians learn to read, they won’t have to pay school fees”, it is shown in “Acte si scrisori”, by Ioan Heliade Rădulescu. For his part, Aaron Florin, a renowned historian, publicist and teacher from the 19th century and a promoter of the ideas of the Ardelene School in Wallachia, remarked in 1840 that the Wallachian General Assembly was not even bothering with education reform. For the same reasons. For its part, the Church promoting education, but on ecclesiastical foundations, was afraid of the progress that secular schools could bring. “The Church, for its part, fears the content of public instruction and especially the rapid progress of printing, translations, book imports that would make various things accessible to a population too little prepared to absorb them“, said Constanța Vintilă Ghițulescu.
