Press review – January 7, 2021

Students could return to the banks from February 8. This will be possible if the downward trend of Covid-19 cases is maintained. Both Prime Minister Florin Cîțu and the Minister of Education, Sorin Cîmpeanu, made statements at the end of the government meeting in which the Emergency Ordinance was adopted by which online education will be extended until February 8.

Students will continue to learn online until at least February 8, when the second semester begins. Schoolchildren will be able to return to the classical education system with the start of the second semester, if the epidemiological situation in Romania allows it.

"I also had a discussion with Mr. Kelemen Hunor and Mr. Dan Barna. Yes, I want schools and restaurants to reopen too. If this is not a health issue, they will be reopened. If we maintain and keep this downward trend, we can open schools on February 8th. But, I repeat, the effects of the pandemic must be reduced", said Florin Cîțu at the end of the government meeting.

Sorin Cîmpeanu, Minister of Education, says that students could return to the classical education system, and such a decision will be taken at the end of January. The other scenarios are not excluded either.

Cîmpeanu also said that there are four scenarios analyzed:

• returning to school with priority for kindergarten and primary school students
• reopening schools with priority in areas where the infection rate is lower
• returning to school with priority for students taking national exams
• reopening all schools

"I don't hide the fact that during the course of tomorrow there will be consultations with the trade unions, with the Romanian Students' Council, with the Rectors' Council and the parents' association, at which they will also discuss the salary of teaching staff" said Sorin Cîmpeanu, Minister of Education, at the end of the government meeting.

The minister explained: "Teachers in Romania deserve a motivating salary regime. In the standard cost per student, this component has doubled in the last four years and reached 6.111 lei intended for salaries in 2020. At the same time, the component intended for all school expenses (heating, sanitation, anti-COVID protection, professional training) is 387 lei per student. The urgency is a significant increase in the standard cost per pupil for schools to operate. There is the possibility to perhaps introduce a salary component of motivation based on performance, through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan".

In the same press statement, the minister also specified that the government adopted an emergency ordinance by which it regulated the closing of the first semester, more precisely the period from January 11 to February 8, i.e. the period between the winter vacation and the intersemester one. Thus, the first semester will end online. Cîmpeanu also added: "Given that the pandemic is still affecting health, it is necessary to adopt the legal framework so that staff and students benefit from the right to education and health. At the same time, we demonstrate the government's desire to hold the courses in the classic format from the second semester, subject to the epidemiological situation".

The pandemic and the exclusively online school led to an isolation of the students, who no longer communicated as much with teachers, colleagues and, although they lived in the same house, not even with their parents. Against the background of the feeling of loneliness felt by children, they are much more vulnerable to the dangers and negative models in the online environment, draws the attention of World Vision in a press release. During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 20% of children living in rural areas say they are only sometimes or never happy, and 7% say they have a bad life, according to the study Child Well-Being in the Environment rural held in 2020 by the World Vision Romania Foundation.

"The incitement of children to attacks against teachers, which the World Vision Romania Foundation strongly condemns, is the symptom of a crisis of authority both in the family and in the school, where the teaching staff plays an essential role. Teachers can under no circumstances be considered enemies of children or their rights and freedoms. Discussions and arguments about topics of interest to society, such as education, can only take place in a climate of civility, with mutual respect for the points of view of all parties," a World Vision statement says.

The NGO, which works with over 20.000 children and parents from rural communities, warns that parents also need education, especially those from vulnerable categories.

The Rural Child Well-being study carried out in 2020 by the World Vision Romania Foundation shows that almost a fifth of rural children never feel supported by the whole family, including extended family members (uncles, aunts, etc.).

6% of children never, or only sometimes, trust the adults they live with.

8% of children believe that the family is never with them when they need help, and 23% of them claim that a family member spends time with them only sometimes or never.

Children's trust in parents decreased by 14% in 2020, reaching 79%.

Against this background, the public success of characters who instill and incite hatred and who appeal to children is not at all surprising, say World Vision experts.

For these children, the main source of information about highly sensitive topics such as sexual violence, according to a 2019 World Vision study, is the Internet (for a third of them), including pornographic sites.

World Vision Romania believes that, in addition to the reform of the public education system, we need non-formal education solutions to combat such phenomena, as well as the development of digital and safe internet skills for children, starting from preschool education.

The oldest patient treated and cured of Covid, since the beginning of the pandemic, in Timișoara, was discharged on Wednesday afternoon. It is about a 95-year-old woman who stayed in the hospital for ten days. She went home to the applause of the doctors and nurses. 

There were special moments on Wednesday afternoon, at the "Victor Babeș" Hospital in Timișoara, and he left with a lot of applause. "Grandma", the oldest patient infected with SARS CoV 2, who was cured in this health facility, went home. The 95-year-old woman was brought to the hospital ten days ago.

Upon admission, the nonagenarian had several respiratory problems, due to infection with the new coronavirus. ""Grandma", as she was called during her hospitalization, is the oldest patient treated in the sanitary unit in Timișoara during this pandemic period. The doctors and nurses of the Department of Infectious Diseases II, under whose supervision the patient was, managed to cure her. When they left, they gave him a surprise. They waited for her at the exit and cheered her. She was picked up by a crew of the County Ambulance Service and transported home", say the representatives of the "Victor Babeș" Infectious Diseases Hospital.

In the last 24 hours, 385 more patients infected with coronavirus were confirmed in Timiș County. The total number of cases, since the beginning of the pandemic, reached 27.107, with 612 deaths also recorded. The infection rate in Timiș is 3,31/1.000 inhabitants.

History is not a long series of epidemics, wars and cataclysms. The world remains mobile despite all crises. And the current pandemic reminds us how few things we can control, Stanisław Strasburger appreciates.

Smaller or larger disasters do not hinder mobility. They remind us how little we humans can control. What will the world look like after this crisis? Will it be possible to travel only with a vaccination certificate? The vaccine against COVID-19 would not be the first to more or less target all of humanity. In addition, if you want to travel to certain places, it has long been mandatory to get an additional vaccination.

Mobility, however, is not only the privilege of a plane flight, with a visa in the passport and a well-filled wallet. Mobility also means the multitude of people who change where they live, often despite the world political order. Mobility often means not having a passport (or the corresponding visa) and an empty wallet. Most importantly: mobility is the belief that the world is not only war, violence and catastrophe, but a life in which you have enough resources to have a roof over your head, something to eat and your children access to school. And if, by chance, you were born in a place where these don't seem possible, or where you don't particularly like it, you can go somewhere else. You can be mobile. Even COVID-19 will not produce big changes in the long term from this point of view.

The transformation of the directors' contest into a populist exercise of the Miss/Mister Popularity type is not only a public danger for the Romanian school, but an attempt to trade the interests of students and parents in order to pay the bill for the promised salary increase that never happened.

Humanists have taught us that power is at least as important as money. If teachers' salaries will not increase, perhaps, in the opinion of some, allowing the election of the director of the educational unit based on the vote of the tenured teachers should pay the bill. To transform the directors' contest (which seems to me to be not strict enough anyway, I would make access to this position conditional on holding a master's degree at a top university in Romania or abroad in school management) into a Miss/Mister Popularity contest, this is a public danger, a public danger that sounds attractive (mnah, the democratization of the Romanian school), but which, if implemented, I believe would have negative effects for the educational system, some of which I propose here as topics for reflection:

(1) Until yesterday, a party that makes up the governing coalition made its banner "Down with school politics". Now, I see that the party leaders have no problem with transforming this mechanism of selection and, if strictly applied, of the professionalization of the school director's career, with a Pageant Beauty Contest. Just as the parties make their program and agenda depending on the distance to the next election, so will decisions be made in schools. That is, more populist on the eve of the election campaign and probably not at all during it. To organize an electoral process of such scope, if you do not want to make a mockery of it, requires time, debates with the candidates, possibly a presentation of the platforms. Does it seem to you that there is a bit too much school in Romanian schools, if only the teachers had time for that? How many teachers in Romania go to classes because they waste time in the office, for example? Imagine that your child's whatever teacher doesn't come to class because he's around the school, handing out flyers for the elections for the position of director, possibly a coffee in the office. Does this thought offend you? On me, yes.

(2) Who Votes Me, Who Puts Me Down? A basic principle by which liberal democracies function is that of accountability to the electorate. Let's start from the premise that a director is elected with 50%+1 of the voters' votes, an ultra-fragile majority that denotes the fragmentation of the teaching staff. This principal can be dismissed at any time, at the slightest decision against the voters, so he will always have to calculate his next move according to what would please the teachers, not the students, not the parents, not the community.

(3) Creation of a parallel decision-making body. At the present time, the supreme decision-making forum in each educational unit, the forum that approves the measures undertaken by the director, from the school budget to the mobility actions of the teaching staff, is the Administrative Council, in which students, parents, teachers are represented, and in in the case of vocational schools and high schools that operate in a dual regime, the economic operators also participate in the decision. The director of the school is, at the same time, the president of the Board of Administration; he can be dismissed by this body of definite importance in the organization of the education system. By introducing a new mechanism for validating decisions, you are only diluting the importance of this CA, which is undemocratic and contrary to the principles on which a school should function (student-centered learning).

(4) From the statements of Mr. Cîmpeanu I understood that only the tenured teachers, who hold a position in that school, would vote. Tenure, as it shows, is the brake on any attempt to professionalize the teaching career. But it's not just about that, it's about thinking about those exceptional situations, where there are teachers who are not tenured, but who do more for the children in that school than any tenured teacher. I have seen such examples - a lot. Teachers who strive to deliver a quality educational act for children, do extracurricular activities, do remedial education, young teachers, in them resides a large part of the little hope we have left regarding the professionalization of the teaching career and the creation of inclusive microsystems of learning. How is such a teacher more "ineligible" to vote for the director than a tenured teacher?

"I doubt that you will be able to really understand what a dictatorship means, because it is, like in fairy tales, in the other realm," Blandiana told the Norwegians who came in large numbers immediately after 1990, when she launched her the second book. This assertion was launched after a reader reported the Ceaușescu couple's visit to Norway: the two were offered the Royal Palace, which is in the center of the capital and around which Oslo's trams run, as their residence. "Immediately after he was installed, Nicolae Ceaușescu asked that the trams be stopped because the noise bothers him. For nearly a century, since there have been trams in Oslo, they have been circling the park surrounding the palace, and not a single member of the Norwegian royal family has complained or asked to stop the most popular means of transport, disturbing thousands and thousands of people, so that one man may no longer be disturbed." The Norwegian reader told Ana Blandiana that he bought the book to learn "something" about "the country that was led by such a man for a quarter of a century". The writer talks to him about "dozens of peoples" who could not react to communism, but as she answers she feels disturbed by the association that the Norwegian makes between her, who was an opponent of the regime, and the dictator : "The normal revolt (emphasis made by AB) of the Norwegians appeared as simple naivety, which humiliated me in my own eyes, but immediately, on an infinitely more dramatic plane, I could not help but add - with envy - that their naivety it was real, because it sprang from an ignorance of Evil, which they had had the unimaginable good fortune not to be touched by."

Evil continues to have many faces, harder to distinguish for Westerners, too used to new ideological patterns. Ana Blandiana, however, hits on them as soon as she can leave the country, before and after 1989. Afterwards, she observes with nostalgia the disappearance of the generation of Jean-Francois Revel, who wrote about the horrors of communism in parallel with the Marxist philosophers, unconvinced that in the East communism committed monstrous crimes on the continent. Blandiana writes that with the disappearance of that generation, in her favorite newspapers L'Express and Le Nouvel Observateur "there was no longer the ability to charm through the transmission of ideas the joy of thinking of the one who wrote, which became the joy of thinking of the one who read". A lot had changed, admits the author of the volume Sister World, and, in addition, she felt "a kind of dust that had settled over the ideas, reducing their impact", however, "something had not disappeared, but something had been added that claimed to make the world more better, more faultless, more correct' and for this to happen, 'she, the world, had only to agree to submit to the control of political correctness'. It's about things taken to the extreme, about censorship that invokes this ideology to throw relevant information and analysis overboard.

Ana Blandiana's volume confirms, among other things, some biographies or old hypocritical reflections of some characters who have become famous. It tells, for example, about a breakfast offered in 1990 by the French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, to some well-known opponents: Doina Cornea, Mircea Dinescu, Ion Caramitru and her. To the official's question, if it is known who the young people who died in the Revolution, Dinescu answered first that it would be about the "Hitlerjugend" and that "their importance should not be exaggerated, because it is about some Utecists who in a few days behind they chanted pro-communist slogans". Further, in the book, Blandiana talks about the leaders of the pro-monarchist parties who opposed the visit of King Mihai in 1992 and makes a carefully outlined portrait of the King, who "was the target victim not only of the cynicism of history and the cruelty of politics, of the interests, the arrogance and lack of scruples of those around, but also of one's own sensitivity and a strange moral sense in the public space".

A doctor and her 12-year-old daughter created a clip about how the vaccine works. Laura Ghibu believes that it is very important that the authorities communicate simply and patiently answer all questions.

The past few days, a clip explaining the functioning of the anti-COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech reached hundreds of thousands of Romanians. The material — which uses animations and simple words — arose from the desire of a doctor and his 12-year-old daughter to get the right information to as many people as possible. He did not receive money for this from state institutions or any pharmaceutical company.

Laura Ghibu lives in Sweden, where she settled almost 31 years ago, after her father arrived there as a political refugee during the last years of communism. He studied biomedicine, then, at the insistence of family dentists, he turned to dentistry. He specialized in oral surgery in Switzerland and Italy, and also teaches infection prevention courses for other doctors and holds health education courses in schools in Sweden.

Shortly after posting the Italian version of the vaccine clip, Laura Ghibu was contacted by Professor Raffaele Bruno, the infectious disease doctor who treated Italy's first case of COVID, who asked her permission to use the material in a company information for the Lombardy region, where more than 25.000 people died from the infection.

In the first days of the year, the Romanian version also circulated intensively, and among those who distributed the clip were the Secretary of State Raed Arafat and several communicators in public health, including Răzvan Cherecheș, Vlad Mixich or Oana Dimofte. The head of the National Committee for the coordination of activities regarding the vaccination against SARS-CoV-2, Valeriu Gheorghiță, asked him for permission to use the clip in the vaccination campaign in Romania, and the Ministry of Health shared it on Facebook. Until yesterday, the clip in Romanian had been shared 21.000 times on Facebook, and had 62.000 views on YouTube. Today Laura Ghibu also published an English version on Youtube.

Now Ghibu is preparing another video with questions and answers about the vaccine, made in collaboration with the University of Pavia. He says that last year was not up to us, but now it's up to us to make 2021 a good year.