‘Why study for the high school graduation exam as long as you can buy your diploma?’ That was the reaction of a high school student to the numerous cases of fraud reported on the occasion of this year’s national exams. The theory according to which anything is for sale without having to work or make any effort for it is deeply rooted in the mindset of our children from very small ages. It starts with the backhanders given by parents thrown into panic by the thought of being unable to find a nursery of a kindergarten place for their little ones and continues throughout the schooling years with various more or less substantial ‘gifts’, commensurate with the ‘services’ rendered by teachers.

Everything is for sale in the Romanian education system: places in the best schools, exams, trips abroad, high school graduation diplomas, higher education diplomas, even the scores in the teacher tenancy exams or academic titles. All it takes is for one to know whom to approach and how to bargain for a good price.

Is there anything a parent wouldn’t do for the ‘success’ of his brat? However, the true price is not counted in cash, but in the future of these young people who walk into mature life with an altered philosophy of values, respect for work and competition. The catastrophic results reported after the high school graduation exams this year showing a pass rate of 67 per cent combined with the wide-scale fraud reported, actually the most extensive ever recorded, are very telling not only as to the poor quality of national education, but also regarding the spread of system corruption.

Hundreds of teachers and students all over Romania are under investigation for exam-related fraud. Never heard of in an EU member state! There are schools where fraud had been organized in minute detail across the whole teaching corps.

Education system corruption actually follows national trends closely, with one particularity, though: Romanian teachers are the most poorly paid in the entire Eastern bloc, therefore having co cope with precarious living standards. In addition competence doesn’t count at all, de-motivating professional development of the truly valuable ones. The outcome of the high-school graduation exams in 2010 is equally the consequence of the chaotic and frequent changes of curricula and of exam tasks without giving teachers and students the time to adjust to the new rules.

The steep degradation of the quality of education in the past 20 years could suggest that the successive governments and political rules have not been really interested in elevating the quality of education of their voters, but right the opposite. An uneducated population that is not familiar with its rights and safeguards against state abuse is easy to manipulate. A population kept in the dark is an easy mass of manoeuvre, always eager to believe the tempting and unrealistic pledges made by populist leaders.

We have well seen that slogans such as ‘Our country is not for sale’, ‘We will do away with mob and corruption’, ‘We are here to resist the return of the communists’ have served their purpose well before major elections ever since 1990.

It is difficult to believe that, in 20 years, none of the governments succeeding to power has been capable of having in place a strategy for the modernisation and Europeanisation of national education. All the good decisions that have been made by the otherwise very few truly competent ministers would be reversed in no time by their successor usually belonging to a different political family.

One of the conclusions is that Romanian authorities have not the political will required to improve the level of education in this country and that, as long as a teacher is diminished by the political class, being classified as someone feeding on the public budget, and yet making so little money, any so-called reform will definitive come to nothing.

In order to make any headway, Romania needs to start investing massively in education and support young high school and university graduates to stay and pursue a career in this country. For the time being, these two prerequisites are nothing but wishes.

Under such conditions, the brain and labour drain can only be expected to go up, also widening the already notable disproportion between retirees and working population, which will render public expenditures completely unsustainable.

More than 2.7 M Romanians have already migrated to the rest of the EU. The trend is increasing alarmingly, as in 2009 alone 2 per cent of the active population (300,000) left while 72,000 left the country in the first half of 2010.

If those people had been treated with the due respect by the Romanian state and offered a fair pay for their work they wouldn’t have left, for no one chooses to leave a family behind just for the fun of it. With its chronic impotence and lack of will to provide decent livelihood conditions to its citizens, the state has driven millions of Romanians away from their homes, but the time has now come to pay the price for it.