In order to know what kind of schools you want to have,
you have to know what kind of government you want to have.
Attributed to Plato in The Republic
A truism among education historians is that the kind of schools a society has will determine the kind of government it will have, an insight usually credited to Plato. Extending that insight a bit to cover a nation’s economy, I rather wonder whether some sources of Romania’s economic difficulties are, in part, found in its schools.
But before addressing that question, I must first say emphatically that the schools here also foster many of the country’s virtues. In addition to providing access to a sturdy academic education, Romanian schools encourage people to live together harmoniously. I’ve also been impressed by what I’ll call a predominance of healthy personalities among students and teachers, or the absence of its inverse – self-destructive or belligerent behavior. In the United States, alas, we seem to have much more of the latter.
However, after year and a half of observing differences between the two systems, I’ve come to propose a dichotomy of sorts as a way to understand them. This I’ve termed community vs. productivity, with Romania is stronger on the former and the U.S. on the latter.
The U.S. has had the world’s most productive economy for a century or so, and that happened because our schools have encouraged the technical skills, innovative attitudes, and individual accomplishments that have made our productivity possible. On the other hand, we also have a higher proportion of our citizens in prison than any other industrialized nation.
Unlike in U.S. schools, which remix students into different classroom groupings each year, Romanian children remain with the same group of students – and the same teacher – for grades one to four. In grades five to eight, they also take classes with the same group of students, but they have a variety of teachers. In high schools, students select a “profile” – technology or literature, for example – and this determines their classmates, courses, and teachers for the next four years.
While this arrangement leads to an admirable sense of community among Romanian students – they not only know each other well, but assume a certain protectiveness toward each other -- it also has a downside. Students might find it difficult to “reinvent” themselves over a summer, and they do not have the stimulation of attending classes with a new group of students each year. There is less cross-fertilization and less impetus for change.
Productivity – defined here as how much profit can (eventually) be made from each worker – may be a rather foreign concept in Romania. For one, the communist system spread the work around so that everyone had a job. But available equipment and school schedules also discourage productivity.
For example, Romanian schools – at least compared to those in the United States -- have limited equipment and technology. There are no science laboratories or workshops or art rooms; or at best they are inadequate to developing incipient scientists or mechanical engineers. The libraries have limited collections and students little time to visit them. A student with an idea – for a musical composition, a new software application, or some environmental improvement – would have little idea of where or how to start developing it.
Further, Romanian students, especially in high schools, take many more courses each year than do American students. A typical schedule might include an hour per week of biology, chemistry, and physics taken over three or more years, rather than one full year of each. Thus, it is more difficult for Romanian students to focus on one subject or carry a project through, both of which discourage the concentration needed for developing innovative ideas.
Social harmony rather than an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged by other aspects of Romanian schools. For one, good students are motivated to provide the “right” answer rather than to pursue a distinctive line of thought. And they have little guilt about providing those answers to students who take their studies more casually. Though good “marks” are highly prized by many Romanian students, their U.S. counterparts are probably evaluated more on the basis of individual effort.
Further, neither written research reports nor vigorous classroom debate are part of high school courses. Thoroughly studying a topic or engaging with the insights such a study might produce has surely germinated ideas that have led to inventions and scientific discoveries – every U.S. entrepreneur can usually tell a good story about some high school experience in which the “light went on.” But in Romania, those opportunities seem not to exist. And direct downloads from Wikipedia, etc., seems practiced more rampantly than in the United States; this provides another way to avoid the mental effort upon which invention and discovery depend.
Despite this, Romanian students have extraordinary talents – a dance competition I saw last summer would rival any similar regional performance in the U.S. They also have a great sense of personal style – distinctive self-expression sans chains or purple hair, likely a by-product of the emotional security fostered in their classrooms.
Students in my school sing, play guitars, violins, and pianos; this despite there being no organized music program. The artwork hanging on the walls also displays great talent, yet there is little art instruction. Students here are intellectually and culturally sophisticated – so much so that I frequently have to remind myself that I’m in a small town in northwestern Romania, not on Chicago’s North Shore.
They are also sufficiently computer savvy that they all know how to download a new movie – for free. But their visions of their future are more limited than their U.S. counterparts. Aside from being forensic detectives (a career idea they’ve picked up from CSI, etc.), their aspirations don’t extend much beyond what they see their elders doing.
And I’ve yet to see signs that school leaders, elected officials, or the omnipresent media are giving much thought to this disjunction between talent and the means to put it to productive use. Some of the wrenching self-analysis that so often dominates talk about schooling in the United States might be useful here. If Romania’s schools here are not encouraging the sort of society – government and economy – Romanians want to have, what changes can be made in them with available resources?
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