The Finnish education system is the best performing in Europe, becoming, at the same time, a world benchmark in terms of education. At the opposite pole is Romania, where, according to the latest PISA tests, functional illiteracy has expanded and become a national phenomenon.
Finland’s education system, centered on the real needs of children. Photo source: archive
Why don’t we have a school like outside? Because the Romanian education system is stuck in outdated communist paradigms, the teaching and evaluation methods are archaic, and the teachers are fewer and fewer and less well trained, education experts told “Adevărul” . In relation to them are students who are bored, uninterested and blasé. They are not attracted to school, nor would they be. Because many things they learn have no relevance today, explained the teachers I spoke with. Education in Romania is bathed in terrible mediocrity and there is no one to pull us out of this mire. Because the authorities, the decision-makers, those who could bring about a change in the system, shrug their shoulders. While some are powerless, many do not get involved out of fear but also out of convenience. They don’t want to complicate their existence. And others, even worse, just throw dust in our eyes.
Marian Staș: “The Romanian school, stuck in communist paradigms”
According to the latest official data, the functional illiteracy rate in Romania in the last decade was between 40 and 45%, and compared to 1994 it even increased by 400-500%. “Kids today read, but they don’t understand what they read. Then, they don’t know how to use the information they received at school in their everyday life”, Prof. Andreia Bodea, director of the ILCaragiale National College in Bucharest, told “Adevărul”. The teacher believes that education in Romania could be saved by a well-thought-out, well-structured and well-implemented reform. “Education is needed regardless of the skills you have, regardless of whether you work, that you are an employer, that you are a doctor, that you are a teacher, that you are a servant. We need an education in the area of empathy, in the area of ecology, in the civic area. Education is the thing you bump into from the second you leave the house to the second you enter the house, no matter who you interact with. And, unfortunately, in this area we also lost the last train”, considers the teacher. What do we need? “We need to build schools in such a way that as long as the students learn in one shift, we give the children a hot meal, we have to walk to framework plans. The world is changing so fast that what we think now will no longer be valid five years from now. But we remained anchored in a teaching and evaluation system that is no longer up-to-date. I no longer go to economics to teach about the steam engine when the kids are talking about cryptocurrencies. We can no longer pretend that artificial intelligence does not exist“, stated Prof. Andreia Bodea.
The state of education, a threat to national security
As a comparison, the secret of the success of the Finnish education system lies in the important educational reforms implemented 40 years ago. The government then decided to “reset” the system and approach another direction, focused on the equal opportunities it offers to all children, regardless of the socio-economic background they come from. In Romania, however, “the state of education is a direct threat to national security, because the inept graduates produced by today’s schools become the inept adults of tomorrow’s Romania”, stated Marian Staș, specialist in education. He believes that changing the education paradigm should not only be a priority for decision-makers, but a country project that will tear us out of mediocrity once and for all.
In Romania, you go to school on an empty stomach
In Finland, there is no school that does not provide a hot meal to the children. “Very quickly we noticed that we cannot divide children into poor and those who have more money. So why not serve school lunches to all children so that none of them go hungry during the school day?”, said Jouni Kangasniemi, adviser in the Finnish Ministry of Education. But, while the students there receive a main dish, a variety of salads, they have milk and water at their discretion, in dispensers, the Romanian students sometimes only eat apples. Iulian Sandu, the director of the Professional Plowing School, from Iași County, explained that the lack of money would be to blame for this situation: “There were no funds, there was no financing, and we only got apple.”
In Finland, every school not only provides food to the children, but also has specially designed spaces for serving meals. In schools in Romania, students eat their lunch on benches, among notebooks and books. Moreover, unlike in Finland, where children receive only healthy food, here many students ended up in the hospital with food poisoning. The most recent example is the September case from Mehedinți, where 121 children and adults showed up at the emergency room with specific symptoms. The local authorities then even triggered the Red Emergency Plan.
In the Nordic country, this national program was implemented 77 years ago, while in Romania in 2024 it is still moving forward.
The concept of “meditations” does not exist in Finland. In our country, they have become a parallel education system
In Romania, the classical education system is complemented by a parallel education system: that of meditations. Bianca Ivan, president of the National Council of Students, told “Adevărul” that the phenomenon of meditation is closely related to the absenteeism that characterizes education in our country. The student talks about a vicious circle that no one has the courage to break. “The rate of school absenteeism is much higher than what is officially presented. And this absenteeism leads to deep knowledge gaps. It is somehow obvious that without additional help the student has no way to recover from the material lost years and years in a row. So, around the national exams, they try to fatten the pig on Eve”, explained the student.
But the phenomenon of meditations has much deeper roots than the recovery of a matter itself. There are situations when the parents themselves put pressure on the children and start private training as early as the third or fourth grade. “Then let’s not forget those teachers who teach in the classroom in such a way that the children do not understand much and have to request additional training in order not to remain coherent“, the parents I spoke with told “Adevărul”. Unlike our country, in Finland there is not even the concept of meditation. The reason is explained by the experts there “It would be quite a problem if we heard, for example, that a professor who teaches children in school gives the same children some extra lessons and earns some extra money for it. It is not our moral or ethical code”told ProTv news journalists Ari Pokka, an expert in Finnish education.
Education in Romania does not look forward, towards the future, but always over the shoulder, into the past. For more than 30 years we have been plodding along, stuck in paradigms, ideologies and broken state mentalities from the Middle Ages, experts believe. Even sadder is the fact that from here, down below, at the bottom of the darkest abyss into which we seem to have fallen, not even the sky can be seen – that hope that someone will do something for our children – died a long time ago too .
