Long preserved thoughts about Romanian education

Just say the word education and you have guaranteed yourself my attention. I became interested in the problem of education in Romania because it caused me a lot of suffering in my schooling in Romania. But I did not suffer because I could not learn or had bad grades. Instead, school did not offer what I wanted and needed at that time. I am not the person to rebel against professors that give a lot of homework or who ask a bit more from their students.

My concern was that I did not get all the useful information and training through the programs offered in school. Sometimes I felt like I lost a day of my life because I had to go to school to meet the attendance requirement. Some of these days were usually in the first week of classes, last week(s) of classes of each semester, days before school breaks, days before and after a big celebration in my high-school (such as Freshmen Ball, Senior Prom, Halloween Party, Valentines Day). I don't consider them useless, but these extracurricular activities should not require students to stop going to classes and professors to stop teaching their lessons because they did not have enough students.

But wasting time at school is one of the smaller problems that I have experienced in my education. The lack of interest in both students and professors about the general purpose of education is a more important problem. Most professors do not see their job as one of the most important jobs in a society; they are not aware of their responsibility to shape valuable citizens. Professors do not make their courses interesting enough for students to pay attention and show respect to the class, professor and material studied. Most of the times the incentive for studying is a good grade and not the knowledge.

And this brings me to one of the greatest problems of the education: plagiarism. In the presentation I made with Corina for the Romanian Conference at Columbia University we called it the CULT(URE) of PLAGIARISM. When you want to increase your grade in a course in high-school you usually had to submit a paper on a certain topic. Usually that paper was not the creation of the student, but a copy-paste version of some article from wikipedia and other web resources or an already made paper that you can find on websites like www.referat.ro
At the end of high school we had to take a certification of English competence because I graduated from a profile that had English as an intensive study subject. So, we had to write a 2o page paper on a topic of our choice from the English culture. Guess where did all the information in most of my colleagues papers come from?
Plagiarism only trains unethical behavior and wastes the time of the student. He does not gain anything than a good grade for printing some information from the Internet. But that good grades does not serve him in the long run, but professors accept it the way it is.

The professors that are most criticized are usually those who actually do something, and those who don't do anything usually pass somewhat unseen. From my high-school experience, there were two professors severely criticized who did not deserve the words that were brought. One of them was a visiting professor we had for English who was a Peace Corps volunteer. He tried to implement to our class the principles under which he studied in US. He asked us to write papers in English that had to reflect individual experiences; no plagiarism allowed. Students actually had to use their brains and come up with two pages of writing in English and submit the paper before the deadline. First, he was criticized for making students work to much for a class like English. Second, he was "too strict" with the deadlines and did not accept late submissions without penalty ... as this was a very wrong thing to do. And third, he was very strict with using materials which were not the product of the student and he failed the students who did not abide. All he wanted to do was to help students improve their English and respect their integrity but he was perceived as doing the wrong thing. At this point, I owe him a great deal of my success in the college writing courses.
The other severely criticized professor was my econ professor who tried to implement the programs of Junior Achievement as extracurricular activities to our econ class. But the time she invested in doing this was not appreciated and was considered a waste of time for the students. All her enthusiasm and all the knowledge from the program was not good enough for this "great" system of education we had.

Mainly, these are the things that bothered me in school. Of course, there are many more to be said about the problem of education in Romania and I promise to write more posts about it.

But, how can we solve the problem of education? Marian Stas has one solution.
I respect and support the initiative he started, which is called "Public School - The Real Deal". The papers and articles he wrote are here, but all of them are in Romanian. In them, he actually comes with a viable solution to this problem and I have nothing else to say but "Go for it!"

I think this is all for now, but I promise you at least another post about my conversations with some of my friends who are studying at university in Romania.

Some Extreme Engineering and Wishes

I just finished watching an episode from the new series of Extreme Engineering from Discovery Channel. This is my favorite show ever, the one which inspired my passion for Civil Engineering. I remember the times from high school when I had to stay up until 12 at night to watch the show contrary to my parents "orders" and when I wrote essays for admission to college about my dream of taking part in such a project set in Romania.

The episode I just finished was about Hong Kong's International Airport. Not only did they build the biggest enclosed space for the passenger terminal for the airport, but they also had to build a huge island for the actual construction of this amazing human endeavor. As if this was not enough, they also built one of the longest system of double-decker suspension bridges in the world, an underwater tunnel and a new system of highways and high-speed railways to connect the city with the airport. Not only did they build this with the most ingenious design and most brilliant solutions to the problems, but they had to stand in front of some of the worst forces of nature, typhoons. If you think this is incredible, wait until I tell you that they finished it in 7 years.

I can only be amazed and inspired by this humanly effort. But I am also covered in a lot of pain because my thoughts took me to my country. Romania cannot even make possible the most mundane job for a civil engineer, building a simple highway across the country. I think the human factor in Romania is a much worse natural force than typhoons proved to be in Hong Kong. My bitterness makes we dream of the time when I will be able to take action and make Romania open its eyes. I want it to realize that life is not about how many estates you have, what cars you drive and how much money you can make. I want it to see that it is more rewarding to have an efficient economy based on a functional infrastructure in a country where the political figures are concerned about development and innovation rather than playing kindergarten games of power.

I hope I am not just a dreamer and that I will live to see it happen. Or rather, I should start thinking about a way to make my wish come true.