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The Option For Pluralist Models In School Textbooks In Romania After December 1989Page 2 of 5
Communist Textbooks The 1989 textbook is strongly ideologised. Its structure is an interesting one though, as the book is divided in two sections: a considerable section of the textbook is devoted to socialist economy, while the other one is devoted to capitalist economy. The section dedicated to socialist economy presents all the issues from a Marxist perspective with reinforcements from Nicolae Ceausescu's speeches. "I believe - highlighted comrade Nicolae Ceausescu - that in our socialist society, no one should, and no one could earn an income without work, by exploiting and appropriating the labour of others, by actions of speculation" 2. The economic truth is strongly distorted by the party’s “truth”, the information coming together with the ideological idea of "good" as defined in the communist system. The section dedicated to capitalist economy presents mathematically correct concepts such as profit or salary, although completely ignores issues like inflation or unemployment. Beyond the accuracy of mathematical formulas, phrases incriminating the capitalist order appear in every lesson, reinforced by the interpretations of Nicolae Ceausescu: "Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu stressed in his 1988’s Exposure that developed capitalist countries have undergone a process of accumulation of wealth in the hands of an increasingly smaller group of people who have become richer, and of increase in the number of poor, whose basic minimum conditions of work and life are not guaranteed " 3. Textbooks from 1990 to 1995 The textbooks studies from this period are unique textbooks, each being a republication of the preceding, with the addition of one or more chapters. First, it should be noticed that the content had been adapted to the new realities, there being present problems such as unemployment, inflation, transition to market economy in Romania. The approach is neutral from an axiological point of view, the textbook providing information on economics, not a predefined idea of “good” related to it. Although other sources of documentation are not explicitly recommended, the book provides at the end of each chapter fragments belonging to famous economists for students to comment. Here are some examples: John Kenneth Galbraith: "As long as it is considered that the economic system works, ultimately, in the interests of the individual – that it is subordinated to his needs and desires – we can presume that the role of economic science is to explain the process through which the individual is served [...] "4 Milton Friedman: "Viewed as means of achieving political freedom, economic relations play an important role in the dispersal of power. The type of economic organization that directly generates economic freedom, namely competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and thus allows a balance between the two ".5 Students are given problems to solve, texts and tables to interpret, this kind of tasks creating the premises of a flexible, pluralist approach, free of a need for a single, absolute and nonnegotiable truth. Textbooks from 1996 to 2000 For instance, the 2001 textbook published by Antet Publishing house makes these aspects clear from its first two chapters, which are devoted to “Economy as a Social Science” and, respectively, to “Economy as a Real System”. In the first chapter economical schools of thought are listed from physiocracy, the English Classical School and its representatives such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and continuing with protectionism, the theory of value labour (Karl Marx), the neoclassical school, the marginalist Austrian school, the school of Lausanne (general equilibrium theory), the Cambridge school, Keynesianism6. The second chapter is focused on real economy and economic systems are briefly presented here: the natural economy, the economy of exchange and the free market economy, the system of command economy, mixed economy and transition to market economy 7. In this generation of textbooks there is a great emergence of several resonant names for economic science: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Paul Samuelson, Michel Didier, R. Fogel and D. North, Turgot, Gilbert Abraham Frois, Paul Heyne. In addition, all textbooks from this period have consistent chapters on of Romania’s integration in the European Union and on international financial bodies, drawing attention to an economy that tends to become global, that relies increasingly on interdependencies and that has both advantages and disadvantages for the stakeholders. Both free market principles and the role and capacity of national states to deal with the international economic environment are analysed.
4 GHITA, Paul Tanase (coord.). Economie. Manual pentru învatamântul liceal. Editura Didactica si Pedagogica R.A. Bucuresti. 1995, p.8
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