To meet the demands for skilled and semiskilled industrial and agricultural workers, the educational system was gradually transformed, heavy emphasis being placed on scientific and technical programs and on vocational training. The most recent reforms, promulgated in 1968, not only reinforced education to meet national economic requirements but also placed renewed stress on the need for increased ideological and political training of the country's youth as a prime element in the successful development of the Romanian socialist state.
Despite the progress achieved in producing a disciplined work force, which benefits the country's economic development, the educational system continued to show basic limitations and shortcomings. Overspecialization and excessive student workloads served to limit the effectiveness and efficiency of secondary and higher schools. Furthermore, the constant effort to expand the mass base of the system, although achieving uniform and satisfactory results by communist standards, lowered the quality of education and sacrificed individual creativity.
BACKGROUND
The educational history of Romania has followed closely the political development of the country. The earliest educational institutions were established in the principalities of Walachia and Moldavia during the sixteenth century and served as the basis of the first system of public education, which became operative in 1832. The unification of the principalities in 1859 led to the adoption of the Educational Act of 1864, which established the principle of free and compulsory education, "where schools were available," under state supervision. Despite the legal provisions for an adequate school system, however, administrative and financial limitations kept the number of schools small and pupil enrollment low.
Little progress was made in improving the scope and substance of public education until the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Beginning in 1893, the country's educational process underwent extensive reorganization: the structure and functions of elementary and normal schools were revised, the curricula of secondary schools and institutions of higher education were revamped, and the position of vocational training in the system was strengthened. Although these advances served to improve the quality of education then available, the number of state-supported schools continued to be low.
Romania's territorial acquisitions after World War I almost tripled its population and added greatly to the problems of public education. Educators considered the system deficient in many respects through the 1930s and the mid-1940s, but they succeeded in achieving considerable uniformity among the school programs at the various educational levels and, in the main, imparted a basic general education to the majority of pupils who completed courses through the secondary school level.
Precommunist Education
The educational system that had evolved in precommunist Romania was operated largely, but not exclusively, by the state and reflected the traditional European order of the times, in which the socially and economically privileged classes were the chief recipients of the benefits of education. Only a limited number of children of the peasantry received more than the four years of elementary education required by the state, and both they and the children of the urban lower classes were discouraged from going on to secondary schools either by the lack of sufficient institutions or by the inability of their parents to pay tuition fees beyond the compulsory level. The public, state-supported system administered by the Ministry of Education consisted of kindergartens, elementary schools, secondary schools, vocational schools, and institutions of higher learning. Academic standards were generally high, and advancement was based primarily on scholastic merit.
Kindergartens were open to children between the ages of five and seven in both state and private schools. No specific subjects were taught and, although theoretically compulsory, attendance was seldom enforced. Attendance records for the 1929-38 period indicated that only approximately 13 percent of all eligible children attended public kindergartens and that fewer than 1.5 percent were enrolled in private ones.
The seven-year elementary school system, four years of which were theoretically compulsory, comprised two types of institutions for children between the ages of seven and fourteen: four-year schools for pupils preparing for secondary schools and seven-year schools for students terminating their education at the elementary level. Elementary education was free except in private schools and, although attendance was supposedly mandatory, enrollments before 1940 averaged less than 75 percent of all children of elementary school age.