No right to education

Article 35 of the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova promises all residents of the country the right of access to education. Good article, good point. And the Constitution, it seems, is not bad either. The only pity is that everything is in theory. In practice, nothing is observed: it’s not that the article, the Constitution, has become a formality.

Two years ago, the powers that be in Moldova came up with a new hobby, it’s called “school optimization.” If teaching is light, then it appears that the government has decided to plunge thousands of innocent children into the Dark Ages.

According to the government's plan, from 2011 to 2013, 1044 classes and 378 schools should be optimized, that is, either liquidated or reorganized. The figure for such a small country as Moldova is terrifying. In 2012 alone, 110 schools were optimized, 57 of which were closed. And it was everywhere, chaotic: it didn’t matter, a big city, a small village; Are there other educational institutions in the locality, no; whether there are many students studying at the institution or few is not the point, the main thing is to close it. And no one took into account the opinions of students and teaching staff: Chisinau said “need” - it means “need”, but students and teachers can be notified that they have nowhere to study and teach, even after the fact.

Optimization, which supposedly should lead to an improvement in the quality of education, results in a massive reduction of teachers, non-teaching staff, and an increase in the number of children not attending school. The quality of education is deteriorating: children, being in classes of 35-45 people, cannot properly absorb the material: children’s concentration in overcrowded classes drops, and besides, the teacher is physically unable to devote the required amount of time to each student, as a result, academic performance suffers .

Another pretext for the so-called optimization was, again, the supposed possibility of a more rational use of financial resources, however, as the results showed, the costs of optimization are approximately equal to the costs of maintaining all those school institutions that were closed.

While “adult” uncles and aunts play at being leaders, it is the children who suffer first of all; it is they who need to get up earlier in order to be on time for lessons at school, which is now not so close, it is they who have to get used to the new team, and for For many children, this is a rather painful process; it is they, the children, who have to be in stuffy, overcrowded classrooms that are not designed for such a number of students.

Quite often it happens that students of Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian schools, when they are closed, in the absence of an alternative, are forced to move to schools with the Moldovan language of instruction, which most of them speak poorly. In this case, the Ministry of Education apparently forgot about the existence of a provision in the Constitution, according to which the state provides citizens with the right to choose the language of instruction.

Much of the “merit” in closing schools belongs to local public authorities; it is their decision that determines whether a particular school will close; they are the final authority. As a rule, for consiglieres, the interests of officials from Chisinau are higher than the interests of those people who elected them. They precede the implementation of policies dictated by people who certainly do not intend to educate their children here in Moldova.

But not all consiglieres so easily abandon their constituents, continuing to defend and defend their interests. It is thanks to such consiglieres that in some settlements children continue to study in their schools, despite the fact that the Ministry of Education decided to liquidate these schools.

The students themselves, their parents and teaching staff defend their interests. In the course of the struggle for their rights, they are not afraid to directly contact the central public authorities, demanding from them any adequate explanations and actions.

An example of protecting one's interests and beliefs is the theoretical lyceum named after. Dm. Cantemir of the city of Glodeni, which is fighting for its existence. They are going to close the lyceum under the guise of optimization, but not everything is clean here either. The lyceum is not included in the government’s plan for optimization, but the decision to close it was already made by the council of the city of Glodeni on October 3, 2012. It is not clear how the issue of closing the lyceum was included on the agenda and whose interests are being lobbied in the mayor’s office of the above-mentioned city. However, the fact remains that the decision has been made. Currently, interested parties are studying and investigating the situation, trying to prevent the implementation of the illegal decision of the Glodyansk consigliere: at stake is the fate of the lyceum, its teaching staff and, last but not least, its students, including children with disabilities. Through numerous appeals to various authorities, to various high-ranking officials both in Moldova and abroad, in particular to the Russian Federation to V.V. Putin, the initiative group is trying to achieve justice.

It is also important that during optimization, schools with Russian as the language of instruction are often closed. When this happens in the city, the student has the opportunity to continue his education in another Russian-language school, but if such a school closes in the village, the only thing left for the student is to transfer to an educational institution with the Moldovan language of instruction, which, in essence, is an infringement of rights. And this, in turn, may become the subject of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Then a curious situation will take place: no earlier than two and a half months ago, the ECHR recognized a violation by the Russian Federation of the right to education when closing a number of schools in Transnistria with the Romanian language of instruction and ordered the Russian Federation to pay 1 million 20 thousand euros to teachers and parents of students as compensation moral damage.

With the closure of rural schools, among many others, another significant problem arises - transportation. Some schools were provided with special buses to transport children, others were not, and children, or rather, parents, must pay for travel from their own funds. In such situations, it often happens that children from disadvantaged or low-income families are forced not to go to classes because their parents are not able to give money to the child for transportation every day.

Due to the liquidation of schools, teachers are being laid off. In the best case, they are transferred to another school, but most often they are forced to look for work on their own: they are often offered several hours at various educational institutions, sometimes these educational institutions are located in different settlements tens of kilometers from each other. The lack of prospects for normal employment and stable work forces teachers to leave the country. If the 90s of the 20th century were marked by mass emigration of scientists, then the 10s of this century for Moldova will be marked by the emigration of teachers.

Thus, the optimization, seemingly so carefully prepared by the government, has so far brought nothing but negative processes. The quality of education is declining, spending on education is not being reduced, teachers are losing their jobs, the number of children out of school is increasing, and all this is the “merit” of the current government and its policies in the field of education.

Link to the author's main blog: http://radisrka-kat.livejournal.com/