The Apocalypse of Education
This text is another translation excerpted from an article by Catalin Avramescu in a magazine called 22 (no. 804, 2-8 August 2005). I get a weekly series of newspaper and magazine clippings via email, including a ‘no comment’ piece which I find particularly interesting from someone called Alin Cristea. Details upon request. I got this piece as “no comment 33” and it included a photo of an iPod advertisement.
“The young people I saw, 150 in six days of interviews, did not represent the average product of Romanian education but were, most of them, over that level. They had been selected out of almost 200 candidates who applied to one of the most competitive sections at the
“Despite all this, what I have heard during this six-day interval does not leave room for any doubt. We are witnessing, in this country—and I am measuring my words—the Apocalypse of education.
“The first thing that shocked me in these young people is that, literally, many of them did not know what is going on. One of the fundamental purposes of any general education institution is to bring people to that state where they understand something about their place in the physical and social universe. However, it was hard to discover even traces of any knowledge of geography among the candidates to a faculty whose subject is politics, a science which studies states, usually. One places
“Even worse is the second thing that I discovered amongst many of these young people, that to them the mental line between reality and fiction is very confused. They seem to live in a world where there is no ontological difference between Napoleon and Pokemon or between Adolf Hitler and Batman. It’s not just that young people do not know history or are not interested in current political affairs. More profoundly, it is a sort of perplexed naïveté when facing the world, a wonder that people lived even before the mobile telephone. A candidate does not know who fought whom in the Second World War. Another states that the Cold War was between Kennedy and Churchill, on the one side, and
7 Comments:
"Wonderful"!
My Romanian experience has left me a bad taste as well... (except the personal one:)) I am indeed still amazed by the ingnorance which caracterizes the people there: weather they are well educated or not it doesn't matter; they got to a stage,it seems to me, where higher education is pointles since the major leak is actually understanding the very simple concept of quality, of "less is better". Unfortunately, there is no such thing as "IQ allocation" to help Romania reduce the intellectual (and economic) gap with other countries if things continue this way.
Attachement to my 1st comment:
caracterize -> characterize
pointles -> pointless
weather -> whether
*wink*
(English is not my mother tongue, so you know :))
Interesting article. I remember fondly (and accurately) that the highschool education I got in Romania, was far better than the highschool education people get here in the US (and this is even comparing apples to apples, that is good Romanian highschools to good US highschools). Admittedly, this was immediately after 1989, it's possible that things may have drastically changed since then.
It would be a terrible shame if this change is indeed taking place in Romanian education. Virtually everyone I know in the US says that the US education system (especially highschool and younger) is going down the tubes. Perhaps education happens to be the thing everyone likes to complain about? Small comfort.
True, the higher education experience in Romania does not bring to mind many happy thoughts. Technically oriented schools (the "Politehnica" for instance) where there is still a good deal of competitiveness fare much better. Economics, Business and Politics schools (not to mention Medicine! a particularly awful item on the list of problems) are not on that level, however. High schools, it seems, do not fare very well either. If you read the whole article (in Romanian) you get one or two positive comments too, stating the obvious really: ther eare some students who are very good and well-focused. Well duh. The problem may well be that many young people simply aren't taught the basics of how to look at and perceive the world, like Avramescu says.
He blames politicians and the politics of education for being the root of this evil. It's likely true, that so-called leaders who are in fact "egoistic, limited, corrupt and megalomaniac individuals" cannot bring much good into the system they have control over.
I think schools are supposed to teach us two fundamental things: how to be and what to know. By that I mean that (1) children must and do learn to understand themselves and their interaction with their environment through (family and) schools, and (2) they are given information about the world in a structured way so as to enable them to function from an informational point of view (I include things like technical skills here).
I am sure there are finer theories of education out there than what's in my head, but I only wanted to illustrate one thing: it seems that we are failing miserably on both counts. We are traditionally not giving the young a healthy start in life in terms of self-exploration and understanding, relating to society and the world, and now in Romania we're losing even that one advantage that Eastern countries used to have over the West: the high intellectual performance of students due to firm policies aimed at such performance. Often this was at the expense of any and all leadership skills for instance.
I wonder, Raz, what you would think of this exercise: how do you see yourself now, had you not gone to the US and experienced life there, absorbed people skills and learned to relate differently (call it Emotional Intelligence if you will)? In other words, what was your basic training in that regard and where did you receive it from? (No need to answer this, I feel like I have a good idea of the answer anyway. :-) )
I was reading up a little on China, out of curiosity--and found something that struck me: they have the same problem, excellent students academically that are also excellent... followers. Not leaders. Not able to deal with change, with real-world issues. The Lenovo-IBM takeover resulted in a huge culture clash along these lines. The Chinese are aware that they need to learn from the Americans though, in fact this is one of the reasons why they bought the company! An extreme example, but all the more relevant I think because it's makes it easier to see what I am trying to say (I hope!).
This comment has become a post in itself, maybe I'll just copy/paste it later LOL. It is not an impulsive burst however, it reflects some serious current concerns and thoughts.
Oh, and Flo, more attention to your spelling next time huh! ;-)
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I am afraid that reading the article in full does not bring more than its abridged version. I am afraid it is foremost an article about the involuntary humor samples at the examination. Otherwise it would also try to go beyond the obvious and suggest a remedy. Was the surprise too great?! Hello! Where have you been to school? Do I sense we, author and readers, are the same blamed product of a faulty education system? Well, yes. We're smart, and well read, a little above the mediocrity we so critically look upon, but hell no, we are not proactive, interactive, analytic and so on. Am I forgetting something? Oh, yeah, if we are not exactly in it, we kinda like throwing with mud. Pointless, but dirty, it's fun. Twenty years more, anyone? ... And I did enjoy the reading.
It's true, the article is about the humour of students' incredible bloopers. It is not quite so amusing because there is a dark side to it. We would expect applicants to a school that leads to a career path in diplomacy to be "better."
It does not offer solutions, that's true also. For one thing, perhaps solutions are not an issue: in a free country and in a free education/labour market, there will always be out-of-place applicants who will make the interviewer's job all the more amusing. Of course, there's also the fact that I, for one, can't think of a quick solution to such a problem.
It's more of a long-term strategic decision to bring quality to education, to shift to a pragmatic approach and to invest in intelligence. The intellectual and the emotional kind, yes...
Shall we open an auction? Twenty years? Do I hear fifteen? Markets seem to be an interesting way to predict the future.
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