The Romanian education enters the autumn of 2025 with communicated schools, street teachers and villages left without real access to education, a sign of a system that slides faster towards collapse.
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“From any angle we look at the situation, to quote a teacher dear to me” I can only say that I was bad in education, but from now on we go to the precipice. “And I totally agree.”
The statement of Aurora Oprea, vocational counselor and former biology teacher, summarizes the drama that the education in Romania lives in the autumn of 2025.
“Caragiale Style” chaotic and manual changes
Aurora Oprea remembers that, from childhood, she has caught the educational system in a continuous transformation: “In the years of communism I was a child and I cannot make a picture of the education to compare to the current one, but in a first point of analysis, regarding the student I went through, I have taken non-stop that created a hostile environment.”
She explains that these changes were presented as steps toward “Alignment to high standards”but in reality they did nothing but upset generations. “From the good intention to its implementation in facts I went from semesters and quarters to modules, skills and qualifications, to the entry contest on the file, from exams with subject and bush content to thinning the information and its exposure in a chaotic way through the alternative manuals that are only the subjects,” Aurora Oprea believes.
The teacher, between prejudices and reality
In his opinion, the public’s perception of teachers is seriously distorted: “The erroneous public opinion, as the teachers only stay a few hours a day at work and if they want to take care of children, and stay home for vacations, and have free part during the school, and go on trips with children and are always dissatisfied and want high salaries, it is a consequence of misinformation and freedoms” support this.
For her, the chair work is one of the greatest social responsibilities: “One is to make a piece of a piece in a factory and be able to impute your salary or receive a penalty, and another is day by day to know that not only the subject you teach sediment and can change the way of thinking, but also, by your human behavior, through your package that you expose to the chair,” Complete the vocational counselor.
Protests for students, not teachers
The current situation in the country and Argeș, where, for example, the cities of Campulung and Mioveni have decided not to organize festivities to open the school year for teachers to protest in Bucharest, it is regarded by Aurora Oprea as a proof of solidarity with the students: “It is not a manifesto for them, but it is a fight for their students. No, I do not give hard for the two more hours officially added (because their real work never ends), a teacher’s work is not only in the chair and the back work often occupies all the free time in her own family not to mention the legal implications that the job implies. But this time they go out for their children, as teachers, as parents! ”, she adds.
The former teacher evokes his own experience from rural schools: “At one point, I taught almost four years in the country schools and not because I had no high note, as it is conveyed about teachers that I could only take the degree. In the rest I had a note over 9, but there were no positions in cities. We went with love in the rural areas where we grew up and took care of the children there.”
Their reality, says it was a sad one: a long shuttle that meant from 4:00 in the morning and arrived at 4:00 in the afternoon with a debutant teacher salary at that time, which does not motivate you to stay, but urges you to leave the first day. “But the soul pulls you to be there and there discovered stories that many of us cannot take. To see how the only mass of some children is the program so blamed milk and horn or the one with fruits for healthy eating. Take over the children in the area and the town halls because they are also affected by the budget cuts do not have to ensure a transport in the new place of education for them ”, Aurora Oprea confesses.
School merging, safe road to illiteracy
In fact, it points out that recent decisions to combine schools leave children from villages without real access to education: “Now, for the decisions to make, the children pay by no longer having access to education, because they have nothing to get to the neighboring locality that took over the school. The town halls, affected by budget cuts, have no way to ensure transport.”
The consequence is alarming, according to it. “The result will be a disastrous one, we will wake up for a few years not with a high degree of functional illiteracy, but with” good “illiteracy in all its forms, and its degree will be colossal,” believes the former teacher.
For her, the lack of basic education is equivalent to a sentence to marginality: “A man without minimal training in a school, who at least learns to write, read, count, is a man who will live all his life in the dark. He cannot be a man who understands the needs of society and the consequences of his deeds. He cannot benefit the family, the community.”
“I recommend everyone not to throw stones in teachers and not to cling to the drying of the forest. No one is perfect. But each one has in life by at least one man from the chair from which he could not learn that subject, he learned something good and beautiful that mattered in the future. Or these things are invaluable.” conclude Aurora Oprea.
Teachers from all over the country arrive in the capital. Authorities are on maximum alert
We recall that the teachers from pre-university and university education in Romania will show their dissatisfaction with the Government of Romania through a large protest scheduled for Monday, September 8, 2025, in the Capital.
Specifically, the Federation of Free Education Unions (FSLI), the Federation of Education Unions “Spiru Haret” and the National Trade Union Federation “Alma Mater”, on behalf of the union members and of all the Education employees, organizes a meeting in Victoriei Square, followed by a protest march. This protest action is the expression of the deep dissatisfaction of the education personnel from the constant refusal of the government to repeal the provisions of Law 141/2025.
