You are exaggerating, I've never seen a beating in school (from a teacher to a pupil). Was in school in Bucharest from the 90's to 00's, had loads of maths and other stem classes. If you didn't keep up you'd get a bad grade, if you didn't pass the year you'd have a chance to correct it during summer school, and worst you'd repeat the year. Nothing uncommon here. And I don't share your hate against the ones competing in the olympics, I knew lots of them, later on they went into research, got jobs at Google, did PHDs at Harvard and Princeton and the likes and are now professors at top universities. And some of them are good entrepreneurs now, you'd be surprised.
ChuckNorris89|4 years ago
I was in school in roughly the same period as you and although beatings from teachers to pupils were very rare, they did exist and happend if the pupil was very unruly and caused trouble in class (I had one classmate who nearly assaulted a teacher during class because he didn't like the bad grade he got), but usually the teacher had the "blessing" from the pupil's parents to perform such "corrections".
Beatings were much more common in the poorer parts of the cities/country with poor performing schools and broken families (alcoholism, domestic abuse, poverty). At top schools in big cities like the one you probably went to with alumni that go to Harvard and Google, beatings were not common at all because usually the children came from mid/upper-class families. But that's very small percentage of the pupils in Romania that are in such a performant environment.
When my dad was in school in the 60's, from what he told me, receiving beatings in school from teachers was very common all around even for stupid reasons as some teachers would go on aggressive power trips if you stepped on their nerves.
petre|4 years ago
Most of our olympics are currenty researchers abroad or tech leads in the country. Entrepreneurs not so much, maybe the networking types.
The hardest math problems we encountered were from the USSR olympics. There was a magazine with math problems which collected such gems.
rogalact|4 years ago
In primary school the older brother of a classmate has broken into a newsstand and has stolen a few porn magazines. My teacher beat him every day for a week as to serve as an example to everyone (yes he beat the little brother). He hit him around his temples so as to not leave marks and would lift him from the floor pulling by the hair. To this day i wont forget this.
Also as recently as few years ago there has been an uproar in romania as to how many parents beat their children for various reasons including poor school performance. You know, “bataia e rupta din cer”.
This happens in poor areas of romania such south or east provinces as much as in the north west.
“got jobs at X” - exactly. Excellence in romania’s education system means obedience. At the top it produces great workers. Not that working at google is not cool or getting a phd is not useful but romania needs more than that.
And while a small sample praises romania’s education system, and great maths, Romania suffers from roughly 50% functionally illiterate pupils. Just because a small sample gets good results in olympiads, frankly contests that mainly poor countries compete in, it doesnt mean the system is great. Quite the opposite.
unnouinceput|4 years ago
I personally received beatings from my math teacher during middle school (5th to 8th grade), which was before '89. He would make me have the fingers up and together (think of like Italians argue) and then would hit my 5 thumbs altogether at once with a wooden stick.
rogalact|4 years ago
It is more pronounced in universities - ask medical or economics students and you’ll uncover quite a few stories.