Economic Crisis and Education. Case Study: the Romanian Educational System

Over the years scholars, politicians, economists and others have recognized that no country could achieve economic growth and development without an efficient educational system. Functional education plays a central role in preparing individuals to become the labour force and in the same time to respect the environment in order to use efficiently the resources. It is said that from immemorial times, education was the one who offered solutions to various problems, but also generated a lot of controversies in the evolution of the world. Thus, in the case of a crisis, the education must be studied from at least two points of view. When speaking about crisis, first we must pose a question whether education is only a victim of the crisis or it may be a cause or a part of the solution needed to exit from the crisis. Starting from such a question, this paper aims to emphasize the existing connection between economic crisis and the contemporary education. The paper starts by using a retrospective and contrastive analysis, based on methodological pillars such as: filiations of ideas, genesis, and statistics. Using quantitative and also qualitative methods, the paper focuses on the way of functioning of the Romanian educational system and offers suggestions how to improve it.