”Challenge 4.0. Educația fast forward” is the theme of this edition of CARIERE Magazine. Questions arise from it: Could the crisis be the impetus that Romania needed to respond to this challenge?; Are we, the Romanian people, brave, intelligent, and determined enough to get out of the languor in which we have been indulging for so many years and to really face the future?; Is the business environment prepared enough to meet the challenge?; Do we have the human and financial resources needed to accelerate this process?
My answer to these questions is one that many will not like: No, we Romanians are not ready. We are not, as people, brave, educated, and determined enough to face the future. The business environment, in general, is not prepared, it does not have the necessary resources to accelerate this process.
Why do I say this?
I invite you to remember what the atmosphere was like in many organizations before the pandemic: lethargy, dissatisfaction, contempt for everything, negativity, revenge. The company was the stage on which many of us were acting, but we hated our own stage, we hated ourselves for being there and we didn’t do much to change. Because this sacrifice often came with gains: financial comfort and social status.
The Romanian attitude, in which we know that we are not well, we know that we will wither if we do not change, is part of us.
Phrases like: “it’s good enough”, “don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today, leave it for the day after tomorrow because maybe you won’t need it anymore”, “pretend like you’re doing it”, “long and frequent breaks, the key to the huge successes”, “let’s hope we’re not alone in this mess” are examples of a Je m’en fiche attitude, of non-involvement, of spectators who boo when it doesn’t suit them and they think they are part of the success when the situation takes a positive turn. I recently watched on TV how a very admired football team lost a game and how the “fans” “rewarded” the players with boos and insults.
No, we will not get out of this situation as long as we do not honor our teachers, we do not consider their job as a noble one, as I remember my father was telling me. To him, it was a great thing to become a teacher, a doctor, an engineer, an economist. Now the values are found on the terraces in a certain part of the city, in luxurious cars, in the large number of improvements brought to your own body, and in a thick gold chain around your neck. If you read a lot, but you don’t ride in I-don’t-know-what cars, you don’t spend your summer on a yacht, the weekends in luxurious destinations, you are considered a beggar living from day to day.
We will not get out of this situation until we give the right place to education until the diplomas are obtained fairly, not through bribery, the doctorates will be completed based on our own research, and not based on compilations and works made by others.
When we promote false values, we will have a society in accordance.
There was a song, immediately after the Revolution: “The state wants you dumb.” That’s kind of how it’s been for the last 30 years. This state did not do much for education, because the state was too preoccupied with covering up its own wounds, it did not have people with more of a strategic thinking, it did not have resources, or sometimes it used them in vain.
And yet: blaming the state alone would be a big mistake. Out of this country came some people who learned a lot, went to great schools, ended up working for big companies, running big companies, or building their own companies, some even unicorns. So, you can educate yourself, you can get over your national culture, defeatism, the tendency of the social circle to pull you down. You can, if you want! You can, if you and your parents have respect for education, if you want more from life.
You can as well if you refuse to sit with your hands on your chest, wait for it to be “given to you” and decide to own your destiny!
A lot of money goes into football, and not just in this country. What would it be like to hear that a large company operating here has adopted schools in a county, that instead of putting its logo on the stadium, it puts it on posters that say about how they support education? It is not possible, because the short-term money does not come from there. Nobody bets on high-school X or Y, but on one footballer or another, on one team or another.
Let’s imagine the landscape of a country as a field where various plants grow: some represent education, other medicine, others research, culture, finance, sports, IT&C, and so on. We water some of these plants, others we don’t, we leave them to the rain, we pray that a few drops will fall on them from time to time. Obviously, some will bloom, others will dry out, then a little rain will come and will give them a little more life expectancy. We will have an educational system commensurate with the investments we make in it, at any level: macroeconomic and microeconomic level, company level, and individual level.
If we talk about what companies are doing during this period, things are a bit more varied: some have frozen employees’ development budgets, others have resized them, others have rethought priorities, thinking that individual development could put pressure on them and they don’t want that (I think this can be real when we talk about people with small children). I hope we all understand that now, when we ask people to adapt, to change the way they used to do things, to maintain a balance, it is even more important now to support them, as they need and as the company needs in the short and medium-term. I am not talking about the long term now, because the extraordinary times we live in require adapted measures beyond the ordinary.”
via: Revista Cariere