Graduation Week Fever

“C’est la vie,” one of my students commented when I admitted to the impossibility of an instructive class session on the day before graduation in my Romanian high school. I, in fact, was the recipient of most of the instruction that was to take place that day. As with most events in Romania, there was no graduation week program that had been decided upon by a committee and distributed to all involved. Instead, tradition governed the week’s program, and I was likely the only person who did not have a pretty good idea of what would take place and when. (Last year, cold and rainy days moved most of the festivities indoors, so far-fewer traditions were observed.)
Graduation was Friday, but even a casual observer could note something special was about to happen from Tuesday forward. Some of the 12th grade boys had come to school in a suit, as had one of the male teachers. He was dressed to administer a final oral exam to students in the “informatics” (computer technology) “profile,” and they all had to dress for the event.
These profiles need some explanation. In a U.S. high school, students have a “homeroom” and an advisor that remains the same all four years; Romanian students have an analgous “diriginte,” but beyond that, there are many differences. As ninth graders, Romanian students pick a “profile” depending on their interests and abilities: language, natural science, automotive technology, business, etc. – in my school, there are nine. Once they choose this, they remain with the same group of students in all their classes all four years (some movement from one to another takes place, but it is the exception not the rule).
When it is time for graduation, each profile picks a color, and that determines the shades of the boys’ ties and shirts; the girls’ shoes and sashes, or dresses and blouses. On Wednesday, students in several of the profiles arrived at school in their color-coded outfits, and had their own schedules while the rest of the students went about its normal business. Sort of.
On Thursday, the real festivities began. None of the 11th graders scheduled to come to my classroom at 9:00 am showed up. So I went downstairs to their classroom (each profile has its own classroom, to which the teachers come, rather than vice versa, as in a US school). I found most of the students there, but hardly in a mood for the dictation test I had planned to give. As the teacher with whom I share responsibility for this group’s English instruction had warned me that she might be spending the morning with the 12th graders for whom she is diriginte, I quickly determined that this was the case.
So I told the students to stay in their room, and that I would be right back with something different to do. (Unlike the U.S., where a classroom must always be staffed with a fully certified teacher whenever students are present, students here are often left to their own devices when a teacher is tardy or unexpectedly absent, or whatever.)
When I returned with more appropriate materials a few minutes later, half the class had disappeared. When I asked, in English and Romanian, where they had gone, I was told “suc.” They had gone to the nearby magazine – Romanian for convenience store – to buy juice and other supplements to breakfast. So I started the class with those who were present; we practiced a song we’d been working on, and then we got into a circle for a collective reading of The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. I’d long before typed up and made copies of the text, so each pair of students could read what they could not understand orally. It was a success – its 220 vocabulary words about what most of the students could read and process the meaning of at the same time. Halfway through, most of the rest of the students returned, so we expanded the circle and they joined in.
It was at my 10:00 am class that a student had greeted me with “c’est la vie.” Strains of “Gaudeamus Igitor” could be heard throughout the school’s main building, as color-coded groups of students walked from classroom to classroom, distributing flowers and cheek kisses as they went. After the gray, green, and red profiles had serenaded us, I adopted a Romanian attitude and decided the final quiz I had intended to give would wait, or not take place at all. Then, flowers in hand, I returned to my classroom for the remaining 10 minutes of the period. (As a supplemental American teacher, I’m lucky and have my own classroom; the other teachers have to keep all their instructional materials in the small drawers of crowded-together desks in the Sala Profesorala.)
Along with two other teachers, I had a special event planned for the 11:00 am hour – for a month or more, I had been working with some of my classes on writing lyrics, in English, about Romania to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s classic folk anthem “This Land Is Your Land.” For the previous week, we’d been talking about whether we could get a group of singers and guitarists together to do a credible job of performing the song at graduation. So, when I got back to my classroom, I was delighted to see two of the school’s most accomplished guitarists there, complete with amplifying equipment, for a formal practice. (Musically minded students here – and there are many – tend to do guitar or brass or piano.)
A few minutes later, the other teachers arrived along with a dozen or more students. Under the direction of our part-time music teacher, we went through the song several times – and voila, we were ready for “From Maramureş to the Black Sea beaches . . . ” (see accompanying video for more).
At noon, another special event was taking place in my classroom – some of the 10th graders in the language profile had written a short play (in English) for a competition the following week, and they had arrived to practice. I was there as the nominal English-language advisor. But these talented kids didn’t need much help. Next up, another articulate young woman wanted to interview me for this year’s issue of the school newspaper. Now that I’d been here for two years, she wanted to know, what did I think of Romania? Ah, how to answer that question in five sentences? In brief – it will be hard to return to the U.S. where I am just another American, rather than The American in a delightfully generous town.
That done, I settled down to begin the time-consuming job of awarding a mark for the past the six weeks’work to 220 students; though the 12th graders will be gone, other students still have three (or more) weeks of classes. Not quite sure how we will all settle down for real school again, but that’s next week’s challenge. Tomorrow would be consumed by graduation. And for news of that, see the next blog.

Reading Cremin, and Tocqueville, in Romania

In the United States, Tocqueville concluded, the aim of education was politics; in Europe, its principal object was to fit men for private life.

Lawrence A. Cremin
American Education, 1980

Among the things I have with me in Romania are the three volumes of Lawrence Cremin’s American Education, a magisterial and prize-winning study of the ideas and individuals that drove the development of schooling, broadly conceived, in the United States. Though I’d read the first, The Colonial Experience 1607-1783 (1970), quite carefully, the two others, I’d only sampled. My intention was to absorb them in anticipation of a post-Peace Corps project.
Given various other demands on my time, I didn’t get to Cremin until I’d been here for 18 months or so. By then, I’d observed enough of Romanian education to begin thinking about differences not just between the two systems, but between the purposes they are intended to serve. A long spring vacation train ride provided a chance to begin the second volume, The National Experience 1783-1876 (1980), and I completed it upon my return. While the first volume considers the intellectual roots of the American paideia – Cremin’s word – the second considers how, in the first century of our existence, a whole panoply of educational organizations solidified a national identity, despite the regional variations that led to the Civil War.
While reading his concluding chapter, “Characteristics,” I found myself making marginal notes about which aspects of Cremin’s panoply of educators are prevalent in Romania and which are not. The notes became less a way of analyzing educational institutions here than an engagement with the extraordinary strength of these institutions in the U.S. and how essential they have been to developing and maintaining our democracy. By Cremin’s definition, it’s not only schools that educate but churches and newspapers and museums and county agricultural societies and professional associations – the vast array of organizations and institutions we Americans have established in order to improve ourselves and our communities.
While here, I have had some opportunities to give talks about education in the two countries and had arrived at a dichotomy to differentiate between the two systems: Romanian schools aim at social stability and American schools at productivity. Cremin’s discussion enabled me to expand on that idea, and it did so by beginning the chapter on characteristics with what a young European – Alexis de Tocqueville – had observed in the early years of our republic. The United States had geographic isolation and reliance on the rule of law inherited from Great Britain, but most importantly it had customs and habits of mind that supported the maintenance of democracy.
What were these customs, Cremin asked? Again relying on Tocquville’s observations, he cited the combination of formal instruction, informal nurture, and individual self-reflection. While all exist in Romania, variations in how they are expressed, and their prevalence, most differentiate our traditions from theirs.
My first talk comparing schools here and at home began with a description of 10 ideas that have influenced the development of American education. Afterwards, a Romanian friend in the audience commented that to her knowledge there is no similar analysis of the ideas that have governed the development of education here. I’d noted that as well (there may be such a thing, but it’s not widely available in English). Though the history of education plays a small role in U.S. teacher preparation, most well-schooled Americans have heard of Thomas Jefferson’s insistence that a nation cannot be both ignorant and free, of Noah Webster’s effort to establish an American language, and of Horace Mann’s campaign for the common school – all American children would learn together in one school, based on locality not on family social position.
While Romanian teachers are well educated in their subject matter – perhaps more so than many U.S. teachers – none that I know have thought much about the ideas that governed the development of the schools they teach in. Thus, my proposition that American schools aim at a different goal than do Romanian ones – the dichotomy between stability and productivity noted above – offered a response to a question they have not posed.
Though Romanian schools do quite well with limited resources, Cremin’s gloss on Tocqueville’s observations has helped me understand the outstanding strengths of our system. And I have found a gratifying similarity between the dichotomy that Cremin attributed to Tocqueville – what I term productivity is a variation on the latter’s “political” life; and stability a variation on schools fitting students for “private life.”
In my experience, schools here do a good job preparing bright and dedicated students for higher education, but they don’t instill in them a sense of responsibility for society at large. Student government is negligible, community service is limited, and there’s a dismaying sense of negativity toward government. Students feel a strong commitment to their families and to their fellows, but they have little or no investment in the future of their country. Their chief concern is about their well-being as individuals, about their private lives.
American students, by contrast, learn to be productive citizens by engaging in political life, broadly conceived. Tocqueville noted this, and Cremin reiterated it. Our wide range of schools emphasize practical rather than theoretical knowledge, something students here wish they had more of. U.S. students learn the value of civic participation by participating in the betterment of their communities through programs sponsored by schools and other educational organizations. Their parents set an example through similar participation.
Several organizations in Romania are encouraging more civic participation – complementing formal instruction with less-formal kinds of educational nurture. Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions clubs, for example, are active in my part of Romania, and a scouting movement is underway. Many of my Romanian colleagues are questioning why their resource-rich country is unable to provide enough jobs to support its population; the growth of American-founded business and service organizations suggest that many see them as an answer. They may not have heard of Tocqueville, but they see the value of civic, if not necessarily political, participation.
One of my Romanian friends, when I suggested she apply for a fellowship trip to the U.S., noted that she wants to visit “if only to see the sort of country that nurtured you.” Reading Cremin, and Tocqueville, 4,000 miles from home, have helped me understand what constituted that nurture. And I intend to continue considering aspects of that nurturing in subsequent blogs.