Violence and cheapened education in the capitalist school system in Romania

“On the Barricades” s06e49

Two recent incidents of teacher abuse in the Romanian school system— one on April 5 at an elite high school in Bucharest where a student stabbed a teacher who announced a test, and one on April 7 involving sexual harassment of a teacher in a rural school— are the basis of today’s discussion of structural causes for the breakdown of relations and lowering of learning conditions in the capitalist approach to public education. Hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski discuss the philosophy and aims of the current education system compared to that of the socialist schooling system: protecting student “freedom” and hyper-individualism vs discipline; the status of students as clients in a per-student funding model, and the issue of including (formally, versus with real state investment) of students with special needs.