Between Punishment and Reward: Pupils` Families in the Service of Communist Education
Between Punishment and Reward: Pupils` Families in the Service of Communist Education

Summary/Abstract: In modern Romania, the idea of co-opting family in the school’s educational effort appeared with the first Organic Law of Education (1864), when elementary studies were decreed mandatory and free. Gradually, this pressure grew bigger and became more and more visible under the ministers who insisted the most on the extension of the school impact upon the Romanian society (Spiru Haret, Constantin Angelescu). In the mid-‘40s, the communist regime adopted this institutional policy, on which it grafted new means of intervention – coercive ones, in most cases – and a new ideology, directly inspired by the Soviet model. The relationship between school and family was intensified to unexpected dimensions, but without ever reaching the optimal degree the authorities were looking for. The students’ families managed to identify ways to negotiate their collaboration, obtain increased advantages, to ignore the school demands or even oppose it, while remaining inside the framework of an authoritarian relational pattern. This pattern eventually proved be a functional one, as its rapid erosion, after 1990, put in a difficult situation the school authorities and the personnel. To identify the characteristic and evolution of this type of relationship between school and the students’ families, we intend to investigate autobiographical writings referring to the period in question, as well as the educational literature of those years, confronted with the accessible archive documents – such as accounts of the school meetings with parents or internal reports of school authorities.

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