A reform of rural education, "where half of the country's children are", must be fast-tracked, the interim Minister of Education and Research, Daniel David, said on Friday.
"Functional illiteracy is reaching alarming levels of national security in Romania (...) When I talk about these figures of functional illiteracy, I refer to those we have in the education system, but I add that we lose 18% of children between the ages of 3 and 18 from the education system. We should have them in school, but we don't. If we add to that the lack of competencies that we target in the educational process within that group, the percentage is much higher in the area of functional illiteracy. Therefore, I believe that technology can be a good platform through which we can do better education. (...) Technology can be a medium through which we can bring those relevant contents well taught. (...) The new minister, me, if I stay or the minister who will come after me, must quickly reform rural education where half of the country's children are," the minister said in an online intervention at the first edition of the D-Tech Forum.
Minister David said that one option would be for a rural school to have a very good urban mentor school and together they could run some online courses simultaneously.
"One variant would be this: a school in rural areas that we know is doing poorly according to the tests we do in the functional illiteracy area could have a mentor school that is doing very well from Bucharest, Cluj, another big city, and some competencies could be developed online simultaneously by teachers from Bucharest, with children from their class, and the others from remote corners could be connected to the class with the help of technology," the minister explained.
In his opinion, technology should be gradually implemented in the education system together with traditional methods.
"We need to gradually implement technology in the education system together with classical methods and where appropriate, it should begin to dominate the educational process. I am referring to IT areas, in areas that by their very essence have a technological component", said Daniel David.
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