Educational policies in Romania from Ceauşescu’s heritage to European mimicry

European Enlargementand the Transposition of the Acquis Communautaire

For many countries the collapse of communism generated an opportunity to integrate themselves into certain supranational structures, and Romania joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. However, the greatest influence on Romanian educational matters came from the World Bank and the European Union, while pressure for European accession acted as an accelerator.^[12] The effectiveness of reform is highly questionable given that its success depends on making optimal use of the partnerships involved in the educational and social environment. From that point of view, Romania is deficient because it has ‘rather adopted reforms from the labour market in a random and biased manner by the electoral cycles: political criteria have prevailed over economic principles’.^[13]

Many educational and legislative paths have led to the desire for decentralisation of the education system. Essentially, decentralisation means ‘a process that transfers responsibilities from the central authority (national state or region in federal systems) to the peripheral authorities’,^[14] and since the Ceauşescu era, when reforms of education were centrally imposed by the leaders of the communist party without real consultation with local stakeholders, things have indeed moved in that direction.

For many years, accession to the European Union represented a fashionable ‘political syndrome’. To accomplish this ‘identity dream’, Romania was invited to address its imbalances and to exploit its human and educational potential. Unfortunately, compliance with the Copenhagen criteria, which required the implementation of the acquis communautaire, proved to be a real stumbling block. Generally, the ‘acquis communautaire corresponds with the common rights and obligations which bind all member states under the European Union’.^[15] Under those communitarian prerogatives, countries are obliged to act at legal, economic, and administrative levels in order to reform their internal systems. Education and training have represented a key factor in this integration process. After ‘exporting’ many of the intellectuals produced by communist-era schools, Romania lacks intellectual wealth because of this massive ‘brain drain’.

Nevertheless, upon accession to the European Union a national strategy was developed to create sustainable development. These times are very different from those of pre-accession. The priorities for this next step were the decentralisation of education and the improvement of the education in rural areas, as well as both an improved quality of education and a greater rate of participation in education and training.^[16] The Report of the Presidential Commission in 2007 described the Romanian educational environment in rather depressing terms:

‘It lacks a culture of lifelong and continuous learning, and there is no integral and coherent vision of all forms of education and training which a person may have throughout life. No institutional mechanisms exist that would certify and validate education performed in informal and non-formal contexts, although the construction of these mechanisms is firmly installed on the European agenda.’^[17]

Moreover, poor participation in lifelong education and training is the indicator that positions Romania at the bottom of the list of European countries. Referring to the criteria defined by the strategy ‘Europe 2020’, and more particularly the number of school leavers who have finished compulsory education or young people with low mastery of basic skills, there is a huge gap between the current reality and goals that were to be achieved. The figure above summarises the situation.

Figure 1

Romania and the benchmarks fixed by the strategy ‘Europe 2020’. Source: Commission Staff Working Document, Rethinking Education. Country Analysis Part I, Accompanying the Document ‚Communication from the Commission “Rethinking Education”: Investing in Skills for Better Socio-Economic Outcomes’ (SWD/2012/0377 final), 40, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legalcontent/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A52012SC0377.

However, the figure shows that regardless of a negative overall image, participation in preschool education seems to be one of the Romania’s strong points. With that in mind, the programme called ‘Early Education in Romania’ (Educaţia timpurie în România) was deployed. Compared with European benchmarks the reforms appear short-term and lacking depth. Internal forces were not sufficiently appreciated by external experts. Instead of learning from the past and using national filters, once again Romanian leaders improvised and took mimically proposals which came from the exterior. The country seemed ‘stuck’ and powerless to make good changes. It maintained some dubious elements from the communist era rather than trying to retain what was seen as the good points of its heritage. Moreover, in adopting external European regulations more or less by rote, Romania’s leaders showed their essentially conformist nature.

Research Methodology and Data Processing

My research is part of an interdisciplinary approach mobilising the methodology of both educational sciences and political sciences, with the original idea of combining my investigations with practical research. At a preliminary stage I considered that internships and study visits to various international organisations and European institutions could be relevant. My research then became consolidated around a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with officials and policy makers. Closely linked exploratory study visits and qualitative methodology were also at the core of this research.^[18]

Initially, I undertook internships and study visits at the Eurydice-EACEA Agency of the European Commission for Education in Brussels and the European Social Charter of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. That allowed me to identify my research pursuit more accurately and then to test the interview guide. I was further able to conduct exploratory interviews and to experience institutional affiliation at both the European and the international scale.^[19]

After those exploratory experiments occurred what I would call the investigation phase. I conducted interviews at the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, as well as the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), the Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in Hamburg, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP) in Thessaloniki, the European Training Foundation (ETF) in Turin, the Center for Research on Education and Lifelong Leaning (CRELL) in Ispra, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg. For research at a national level, I operated in a similar way, interviewing educational actors of academic, ministerial, and professional environments in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Craiova and Iaşi. Missions of a few days to several weeks were made to each of these sites.

The most difficult task was the constitution of my sample, because officials are not only bound by rules of professional confidentiality but are difficult enough to reach in the first place. To meet the challenge, I resorted to the ‘mockup principle’ and more specifically ‘purposive sampling’, both developed by Van der Maren.^[20] I was thereby able to identify international, European, and national officials involved in the creation and administration of educational policies and who therefore know the situation regarding Romanian education policy. I conducted more than eighty personal interviews in French, English, Italian, and Romanian,^[21] and I recorded conversations when individuals gave me permission to do so.^[22]

The method of semi-structured interviews allowed me to obtain reliable data,^[23] and then to ensure a fair distribution of proportionality in the interviews. I analysed sixty-three of them, amounting to twenty-one for each level — international, European, and national. Then, I undertook the ‘grooming tasks’, anonymisation, transcripts, and translation into English.^[24] Finally came my analysis of the content.^[25]

The main theme of the interview guide analysed as part of this article covers lifelong learning policies in Romania, and implicitly the influence of European and international organisations on Romanian educational policy. To make the most of these data and facilitate processing, I constructed an analytical grid divided into various subcategories, such as ‘communist legacy’, ‘conformism / European mimicry’, ‘acquis communautaire’, ‘influence of international organisations’, and ‘influence of the European Union’. By identifying certain general characteristics, I promoted ‘modelling’^[26] and subsequently I compared the determined models.^[27] Once I had finished with the encoding and decoding steps, I moved on to traditional analysis. Quotations from the interviews are designated as follows: ‘A’ for interviews with international officials; ‘B’ for in terviews with European policy makers; and ‘C’ for interviews with Romanian educational actors.

Communist Heritage and European Mimicry in Romania

Has Romanian educational policy experienced an ‘evolution’ or an ‘involution’ in the last 25 years? Many voices commonly admit that Romania has failed to give an identity to its educational policy or to make the most of postcommunist liberty. In fact, educational barriers hindering advancement and shortage of resources both material and human prove to be interrelated.

Asked whether Romania has managed to break with the legacies of the past, and if so how, interviewees at all levels expressed various opinions. It was almost unanimously recognised by both national and supranational officials that over time Romania enjoyed, at a particular historical moment, a well organised education system which performed well too. A European official stressed the importance of the educational approach adopted in Romania after the First World War:

‘In Romania in the 1920s and 1930s the so-called “social pedagogy” was a very interesting approach on lifelong learning. The quality has been lost, and that is a pity because it was social pedagogy which created its approaches and traditions.’ (Interview B18)

The description of the heyday of Romanian educational policy was complemented by a national interviewee who highlighted the breadth and the quality of the education promoted then, especially adult education. Meanwhile, an enthusiastic Romanian official was convinced that

‘until 1947, Romanian culture competed with the major European cultures, with Eliade, Vulcãnescu, Brâncuşi, and other writers and men of culture. This shows that the educational system worked well.’ (Interview C7)

Mircea Eliade, mentioned there, was a philosopher whose specialism was the history of religions; Mircea Vulcãnescu was a politician and philosopher, while Constantin Brâncuşi was the most important Romanian sculptor who had worked for a time with Rodin in Paris. Educational policy proved unequal to the challenges of the communist regime after the Second World War, although there have been a number of successful programmes and elements in education, mostly in adult education. However, a European official sounded a cautious note:

‘During the communist era in Romania, people had to learn how to repair cars when they broke down. Women learned informally from their grandmothers how to cook and many other things. […] You realise that people in Romania probably have more skills than in the UK but according to the statistics, the situation is very poor because they do not officially attend adult education courses. However, this is not the case. The tradition is to learn in the family or with friends. That is the big difference. In southern Europe, learning is rather oral. In northern Europe, it is more structured and more institutionalised. It is totally different.’ (Interview B17)

Such an education tradition required a background of knowledge and skills organically acquired in the absence of formal instruction. A Romanian official testified that to avoid institutional imbalances, cultural institutions existed in each county:

‘Even during the communist era there were educational clubs and circles or people with serious and strong concerns. The state took over the worries related to housing and working. People sought to take advantage for personal development.’ (Interview C10)

During the communist era, the centralisation of any field of activity, including education, was extremely strong. Implicitly, for some people, even cultural institutions were only referred to as an indoctrination tool of the communist party given that

‘some adult education institutions existed: cultural centres, cultural houses, and some popular universities. At the time, they were rather seen as the institutions of the party for promoting communism.’ (Interview C5)

Willingly or unwillingly, those institutions were a prerequisite for the development of transversal skills through poetic and literary circles, painting workshops, popular and folk music, traditional dance, or sewing. Another Romanian interviewee spoke about the changes after the demise of the communist regime: ‘We felt satisfaction in erasing what had been done before, good or bad, and starting from scratch, with a new policy, while rejecting what had in fact worked.’ (Interview C13) Such a manifest desire to change absolutely everything was perhaps one of the biggest political and institutional paradoxes of Romania. At the national level, regression can be identified because activities such as those just mentioned, rather than continuing to contribute to the enrichment of skills throughout professional careers, were more or less abandoned. For example,

‘we can talk concretely about the side-lining of vocational schools or schools of art and crafts. They worked well during the interwar period and the communist time. Currently there is a shortage of young people for certain jobs.’ (Interview C21)

The first risk in polarising the Romanian educational policy was therefore that more or less useful, effective, or well-appreciated measures were completely renounced. Renewal and adaptation would have been the thing to do to make the best use of good examples from the past, highlighting what still had contemporary benefits. More specifically,

‘we need to rethink what was right in the historical and cultural past and what was destroyed by modernism. We need technology, civilisation, which helps us to live better, but let’s not forget how our past helped us so much to grow as a nation and as a country.’ (Interview C10)

Implicitly, Romanian education policy has been trapped both in short and long term by reforms called in to replace what had been destroyed, but which has led to the apparent perpetuation of negative strategies from the communist past. A few examples will illustrate the point: a European offi cial drew att ention to the terminology bequeathed to the country by communism, as

‘when using the word “learning”, we see a personal interest. On the other hand, the word “education” includes obligation and the imposition for one person or a group to learn specific concepts or a profession. “Education” is perceived to be a term of “ceauşism”, less warm, devaluing…’ (Interview B11).^[28]

One of the heaviest burdens of the past has been the insufficiency of managerial capacity. It might be that it is the result of passing from excessive centralisation to decentralisation. A more favourable sequence of policy might perhaps have prompted better coordination of theory with practice. According to one European-level interviewee, an institutional abyss opened up because

‘there are many cases in which Romania is trying to adapt at least the legislative framework. There are big differences between the policy implementation and the adaptation at the legislative level.’ (Interview B13)

Poor management of educational policy in Romania was only the beginning of a longer process. The divergent situation prevailing throughout the country seems to be strictly related to how the essence of the educational process was designed. If in communist times learners had not been at the centre of educational concerns, rote-learning was the golden rule for success:

‘Education before 1989 was based on memorisation. Now it is replaced by “copypaste”, by information taken from the internet and presented as “own work”. This is what a large proportion of the students do. Before, it was memorisation and regurgitation, now academics plagiarise in their research.’ (Interview C7)

Such an uninvolved, rather distant attitude to learners is accelerated nowadays as new technologies are developed. Teachers, students, and policy makers give the impression that they are severely affected by a lack of determination. In the words of one interviewee, the country needs to find the motivation to take action. The following unfortunate state of education policy was remarked upon:

‘It is because of convenience, and it is not a good approach. Without a dedicated approach, we lose. It remains the hope that at the micro-level, beyond the documents, there are people who try to apply these documents in a creative way in order to achieve something.’ (Interview C17)

Loss of motivation, lack of interest in the public good, self-interest, corruption, lack of professionalism would be the most appropriate qualifications for the current situation of political languor in Romanian education. The rhythm of sociopolitical transformation is linked to an inability to take advantage of existing potential and a consequent inability to achieve consistency among different educational partners. At the national level,

‘we usually do not value the efforts, the work […]. If the legislative framework is made by the institutions, there is a lack of continuity. This is the story […] — the lack of responsibility.’ (Interview C18)

All these features have made the effects of legislative measures unpredictable, considering the purpose of an educational recovery on a national scale.

However, the educational reforms in Romania have not only been domestic matters. Educational exchanges are more and more Europeanised and internationalised, which means that educational governance has metamorphosed. Apparent ‘mutations’ that materialised at national level were, in some cases, simply ‘natural’ results of external influence. In this way, the

‘change of mentality in Romania started in1994-1995 when we had the opportunity, by the World Bank, to initiate a reform in the rural education system. At that time, this was the trigger, and we have created new educational plans, school curricula, and alternative schoolbooks.’ (Interview C9)

To be sure, Romania has benefited from external monitoring. International organisations have intervened with technical and methodological follow-up to help the country offset the deficits of the old regime and make education accessible to all. Priorities have been established and plans of action developed. To prevent education becoming a luxury reserved for certain occupational categories, the focus has been on equality for all:

‘The main problem is the lack of discourse on equality in education. It is a deeply meritocratic and elitist discourse, behind which a policy is crafted. There were some problems in Romania in this regard, several Phare programmes and World Bank actions being focused on equity. At the level of the education of “gypsies” in Romania there is a legislative framework for the school, the opportunity to study in the Romani language, a specific curriculum, and special teaching programmes.’ (Interview B13)

The World Bank and the Council of Europe, which Romania joined in 1993, have played a significant role in the implementation of initiatives in education. Taking into account the diversity of the initial contexts, solutions were considered for both the short and long terms. Nevertheless, in time, the curve shows an atypical relationship between commitment, action on the ground, and potential impact. At supranational level, one official considered that in Romanian national reports, ‘the answers are often too general […] and difficult to apply. They do not correspond to the questionnaire.’ (Interview A11) Learning at all stages of life and in all social contexts remains something all of Romanian society desires, but various factors have kept the country at the bottom of the scale when assessed at European and international levels.

Although in the 1990s the influence of international organisations was clearly important, slowly but progressively, Romania has woven itself more and more into the European process. Analogously,

‘it is clear that what has been changed in law and practice was largely due to the activity of international organisations. In recent years, the impact of European programmes, which have provided financial support, has become more important, but there was also institutional pressure in order to motivate initiatives for improvement.’ (Interview C4).

A process of restructuring had to be undertaken in order to join the EU, and analysis of what interviewees said revealed that national policy makers consistently connected internal reforms and European prerogatives. Polarisation had occurred because, on the one hand Romania had expanded its range of reforms to meet European requirements, while on the other hand those actions were carried out through growing European investment. Thus,

‘the EU has a major impact on the education system in Romania and has invested heavily in the programmes of technical assistance. I think that the country had a lot of success in education reforms through vocational training. It also introduced various systems of thought promoted by the European Union.’ (Interview A14)

Joint research projects were masterminded, and multinational actions coordinated. Reforms in education, justice, and health formed the core measures undertaken by the country to place it on an equal footing with the other member states and with the purpose of adopting the acquis communautaire. The preparatory period for European membership was based on the logic of successful and determined actions:

‘Everything has been linked to pre-accession and post-accession to the European Union. Romania had the right to participate in the Grundtvig programmes for adult education before accession.’ (Interview C1)

The country underwent what could be called a ‘European contagion’ firmly orientated towards changing the national configuration. In this regards, an European official had this to say about the challenges and impact of the European Union on the Romanian education policy:

‘It is always difficult to assess the impact of a European Union policy on the member states regarding the education systems, especially since education is not an integrated / common policy. It is an exercise done by the Commission.’ (Interview B15)

Given that it is very difficult to verify what impact an European or international organisation might have on a member state, the objective of this research must necessarily be limited to providing elements for understanding the overlapping of the national and supranational levels. International officials shared some information with me about the double taxonomy of countries within the European Union. Specifically,

‘the influence of the European Union at national levels varies from one country to another. In countries where the educational system has a solid basis, changes occur, however with influences that are reduced when compared to the new member states. The last ones to join adopt almost all that is proposed at European level. Having at their disposal only a basic preliminary framework, they take over everything that comes from the European Union. In contrast, the other states adapt their existing systems, and in this case, there is an adaptation and not a renewal of the system. They are more reluctant to reformulate their systems, while the new member states absorb things coming from the European Union.’ (Interview A11)

Such dissection raises questions about Romania in this process of reconfiguration of the political players. The responses of the relevant international, European, and national officials prefigure the unanimous embedding of the country into the category of newcomers treated as having been stripped of the historical and cultural roots of their education policy. In the Romanian space, investment in education remains an electoral advantage and adaptive measure taken strictly to agree with the challenges of European prerogatives. Thus, the national translation of European programmatic actions is practically non-existent, and in consequence,

‘Romania is part of the second category of countries, without a national filter. These are standards to which we responded in a short time and we had to show that we were good enough to be in the European Union.’ (Interview C1)

Faced with this multidimensional European and international situation, Romanian education policy lies at one end of the spectrum, coming second either to supranational tools offered, or to the valid elements structuring the national system.