Tensions and convergences: A discussion of education reform in Romania

Abstract

Wolf packs, wild dogs, Brigitte Bardot, Bucharest, thieving orphans, gypsy tribes, vampires, Vampirella, Vlad the Impaler and other vampish curiosa leap to mind at mention of Romania or its most celebrated principality, Transylvania. When the writer and traveller Patrick Leigh Fermor was about to cross the frontier from Hungary into Romania, in the early 1930s, his hosts warned him: ‘It’s a terrible place! They are all robbers and crooks! You can’t trust them - whole valleys are riddled with VD’!" (Fermor 1988: 75). Little has changed since then about the oft strange and ever persistent realities or fictions that continue to hound this central European world, only briefly teased from obscurity by the lurid violence of the 1989 coup and subsequent demise of the Ceauşescu regime. Yet, the Ruritanian rhetoric and impoverished images are a disservice. Romania has a rich and diverse culture, and a no less varied history which, down the centuries, has seen it under the sway of marauding hordes of invaders, not to forget the armies of three Empires: the Roman, the Hapsburg, and the Ottoman.