46 TRANSILVANIA 3/2019 100 years of Romanian Education: Failures and Achievements Valentin MAIER & Dragoș SDROBIȘ Universitatea din București; Liceul Teoretic „Gelu Voievod“ din Gilău University of Bucharest; Gelu Voievod Teoretical High-School of Gilău Personal e-mails: valetin_maier@yahoo.com; dragossdrobis@yahoo.com At present, Finland is considered to have the best system of education in the world, a system which many countries around the world have been trying to copy. A legitimate question would be: Why have they chosen to massively invest in education? Te standard answer all Finnish are most likely to provide you is that they have acknowledged they have only two resources in their country: forests and people. In consequence, they chose to invest in the most important resource for their future development. For Romania, the contemporary period represented a set of attempts to change the agrarian character of society. From a socio-economic point of view, the 20th century was the period in which the peasant had to be empowered with new skills and competences to enable him to escape poverty. Te interwar period began with two major reforms aimed at re-establishing Romania’s social edifce on new foundations. Tus, electoral reform and land reform hastened the transition from a “neo-serfdom” agrarian society to one of independent peasant farms. Later, communism saw in the collectivization of agriculture the vital mechanism by which the peasantry could be pushed towards industry and, implicitly, cities. Te resulting “(r)urbanization” has radically changed Romania’s socio-economic landscape in just four decades, with huge social costs 100 years of Romanian Education: Failures and Achievements Romanians tend to defne themselves as a nation of “education lovers”. Despite this positive self-perception, it is no secret that the educational system is incapable of improving the potential of the Romanian society. Recently, in December 2018, the Presidential Administration of Romania launched a public debate regarding the way in which education should develop in the next 20 to 50 years. Entitled “România Educată”, the initiative hasn’t succeeded in generating a national debate regarding this issue. In other words, the Romanian society and political class are not convinced and aware of the fact that education can indeed be a mechanism of social change and of economic development. Nevertheless, in order to “contextualize” and to emphasize an apocalyptical image upon the current system of education in Romania, critics usually tend to uncritically praise previous systems of education from Greater Romania or from the communist regime. Te result is a sort of antithetic discourse that ofers little incentives for the present debate. For this reason, the main challenge of this study is to fnd out if the Romanian system of education of the last century was, indeed, conceived as a true investment in the human capital. No matter how vast the subject may sound, the authors would focus on the evolution of the educational ideal in the last century, while contextualizing the performance of the educational systems with statistical and comparative data. Keywords: Romania, 20th century, education, human capital