Among the season’s most debated topics was the new Romanian language curriculum for high schools. This time, the dissatisfaction is tied to old literature, to the chronological structure, and to the fact that the 9th-grade syllabus includes neither contemporary writers nor women. I have heard many exaggerations in recent years, and I believe we have now reached their peak.
In the past, people spoke about removing classical literature from schools, and naturally, about introducing contemporary authors. The pressure writers exert on schools reminds me of a novel by Constantin Țoiu, where a member of the communist elite publishes a volume of poetry, then orders all factory workers to have their overalls sewn with a pocket matching exactly the book’s size. And, of course, every worker is to carry that book in the pocket daily, reading it during lunch break and marveling at it, thus giving the poet the illusion that he has readers. His only readers.
Returning to the recent curriculum, which is still under debate, I want to point out that it proposes a chronological approach structured around several major moments (literary periods). It is not a curriculum about old literature, as some online posts suggested. In fact, the 17th-century chroniclers are allotted only two class hours.
For many years, literature was taught thematically, by genre, with only a slight chronological component toward the end of schooling. Gradually, this created a fragmented type of education, with information cut into pieces. I’m sure you have noticed the hunger for history in recent times. People increasingly speak about identity crisis, the need for reference points, for authority. In this context, I find it essential that, in the first year of high school, students receive a map of what lies ahead. They should have at least a faint idea of what literature has been up to this point: when it began, what was written, what happened before us and before today’s books.
I don’t know why people imagine that speaking about the beginnings of writing automatically means grappling with monstrous words from ancient times, with tangled—and even lethal—texts. History, including the history of writing, is made of events, and people love to talk about them, to seek their roots, to understand the mentalities of earlier centuries. In fact, this is one of a human being’s essential duties: to preserve the link between generations.
Why should it be easier to study a text like the Strasbourg Oaths than Neacșu’s Letter from Câmpulung? Old texts do not imply philological analysis. At fifteen, you want to know how everything started: who your ancestors were, how they thought, what their interests and troubles were. From the Anonymous Chronicle of the Brâncoveni you learn what a pocket with hidden compartments looked like, how young men traveled to Istanbul or Vienna, where they bought their carriages, and what breeds of dogs were prized. You learn how Cornea Brăiloiu panicked upon meeting a dark-skinned man, ruining important diplomatic relations. Some may say this isn’t literature. But it is precisely that: here begins the personal portrait of a human being. And it’s not only about reading old letters or chronicles, but about the kind of stories embedded in them.
It is easy to blame students: My students will never be able to read old literature! I absolutely do not believe that. Do you know when students become unhappy with the subject matter? When the teacher is unsure, unprepared, visibly dissatisfied with the content. And all these stem from a teacher’s superficiality, vanity, or—most seriously—the betrayal of their profession.
Moreover, the new curriculum does not stop at the chroniclers, as I said, but moves on to other periods: Enlightenment ideas, the beginnings of realism. Nothing shapes a person’s character more than the sense of taking history into one’s own hands. To know what came before so that you can synthesize, extract themes or genres and literary codes yourself—that is what learning means.
There is a difference between school and reading. School must give you a system, must show you the facts and their order.
Alongside Romanian classes, and building on them, we need reading clubs—another type of education that shapes readers’ tastes. But to read, you must first be trained.
I have always opposed chaotic reading at formative ages. Moreover, I believe that school must, first and foremost, provide foundational knowledge, classical literature, national milestones. You should know that for centuries we wrote using the Cyrillic alphabet. That each literary stage was a conquest, a step forward. Only after that come pleasures, refinement through specific readings.
Contemporary literature should be only referential when studying classical literature. I would even say that caution is needed when introducing it into textbooks or curricula. Nothing fundamental is built solely on the events of the moment; it is built on what has stood the test of time.
What do we learn from the literature of the 17th century? We learn where we started.
For centuries, we lacked literature written by women, but we understand from men’s writing what women’s social roles were, and we can supplement this with a short contemporary text.
What I find excellent in the new curriculum is that the 9th-grade Romanian syllabus allows teachers to choose anyillustrative text for a period or historical mentality, or for early literary explorations. And this is essential. Naturally, such choices must come from extensive reading and solid culture. I trust teachers and their education. I am sure they will choose compelling texts, bring to life the dormant stories in chronicles and classical literature, occasionally linking them with other periods, perhaps even the contemporary one.
Literature classes rarely mean being enraptured by a text. For the most part, they mean intellectual growth. I know many teachers are dissatisfied with the curriculum out of nonconformism, habitually aligning themselves with the dominant wave, or for reasons unrelated to school. But I also know that this dissatisfaction is temporary, rootless. A teacher has the capacity to understand the priorities of an era and the enthusiasm to support a courageous initiative. And this curriculum—which proposes knowledge of the major moments in the evolution of literature—is indeed an act of courage in a difficult time, when contemporary writers are pushing forcefully at the doors of the school.
I must also say that the people who designed the curriculum are pre-university teachers known for their culture and didactic artistry—Irina Georgescu, Bogdan Rațiu, Andreea and Ciprian Nistor, Isabel Vintilă, among others—joined by important academics: Mircea Martin, Magda Răduță, Ema Ilie, Rodica Zafiu, Alexandru Nicolae, and others. And it is a guarantee for me that Oana Fotache Dubălaru—a scholar with profound vision, dedicated to training Romanian teachers, director of a doctoral school, dean of the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest—coordinated the team that elaborated the study themes. Therefore, the return to a chronological approach is deliberate, thoughtful, purposeful.
The current curriculum is not a return to Ceaușism, but a way of cutting the knot in a moment of generalized chaos and confusion, after higher education has turned into family living rooms, and after school curricula have swollen with obsolete semiotic notions, with an impossible mix of texts, with writers selected on unstable criteria, and so on. High school is the school of foundational knowledge. And the current curriculum advocates exactly that.
I do not see why schools should practice a hermeneutics of multiplication before students have learned the multiplication table.
