All in Kindergarten, All in School -- Goal of Romani Education in Romania

"I'm proud of my former students, and nearly 80 percent of them have become key persons in the emancipation of Roma (Gypsies) population," Gheorghe Sarau, inspector for Romani Education in Romania's Education Ministry, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

In his small but tidy downtown office in Romania's capital Bucharest, a beaming Sarau, also a professor at the University of Bucharest, named some of his favorite students. They include Anisoara Oprisan, a program manager at International Blue Crescent, Istanbul; Lavinia Olmazu, a project coordinator at Media Diversity Institute, Britain; and Mihaela Zatreanu, head of the Roma Cultural Center in Bucharest.

The Romani language is now taught in all kinds of schools throughout the country, from kindergarten to primary school, middle school and university, said the 53-year-old professor. "We have worked out both the teaching programs and the text books for all grades of students in the country," he added.

According to the Romani language professor, Romania was one of the European countries with the largest number of Roma people and the largest number of people studying their language and culture.

Although he is not a Roma himself, Sarau is now one of a few leading experts in Romani affairs and language education in the East European country. It was only by chance that he became interested in Romani history when he was a university student.

However, he admitted that it was not easy to popularize the Romani language and culture in Romania, as the Roma people's integration into society had been a great challenge for Romania's governmental and educational organizations and sociologists as well.

Recalling the history of popularizing Romani education in the country, Sarau said: "The first steps in the Romani education were taken in 1990, when the Romanian Education Ministry established a department for national minorities, with a special inspector in charge of Romani language teaching.

Starting in the 1992-93 school year, he added, the government had started to reform the Romanian education system, calling for teaching the Romani language in the first four grades of primary schools.

In 1992, Sarau said, he tried to introduce an intensive Romani language teaching course as a second language at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest.

After six years of hard work, he added, the Romani language was officially listed as the main academic discipline, or the "first language," in all schools.

Starting in 1999, Sarau started to create a Romani language summer school, the first academic seminar held in the country to identify potential Roma teachers. Since then, 15 summer schools have been established.

Working together with his colleagues in 2001, Sarau founded a summer kindergarten as a preparation for children, particularly Roma children, who had no chance to enjoy kindergarten education before going to elementary school.

The creation of the summer kindergarten, he added, aimed at helping the children learn such basic skills as person-to-person communication or expression. Now the program has benefited more than 2,400 Roma children.

In 2005 Sarau launched a "second chance program" with a flexible teaching method, a three-year educational system, with the help of the Phare program and the Romanian Ministry of Education.

Financed by the European Union, the program has attracted up to10,000 people, many of them youngsters who quit school for different reasons, and encouraged them to return to school to complete their education or learn a trade.

Recently, Sarau has drafted a new program called "All in Kindergarten, All in School." The program is financed by some European structural funds and will involve some 8,400 children from 20 counties across Romania.

Sarau also talked about the history of the Roma population in Romania, saying that the Roma were slaves in some monasteries after they came to Romania via the Byzantine Empire at the end of the Late Middle Ages (1250-1500). In the following 600 years of slavery, they received boarding and lodging from their masters, but when they were emancipated in 1856, Roma got no assistance from the state.

"They became free with no more boarding and lodging from their former masters. They had to settle on the outskirts of villages where they developed peripheral districts of the Roma community from which they started to spread into the city, where they established their own neighborhoods," Sarau explained.

The latest population census carried out in 2007 showed that there were over 530,000 Roma in Romania.

"The figure is underestimated," Sarau said, disclosing that many Roma in schools did not identify themselves as Roma because they felt embarrassed or because they were unable to differentiate between the concepts of nationality and citizenship.

Romania can now boast some 460 Romani language teachers and the same number of teachers passing on the history and traditions of the Roma population across the country.

In Sarau's opinion, preschool education was essential to make Romani education attractive for Roma children. He said recent studies by international organizations in Eastern Europe showed that all problems in the region had roots in preschool education.

(Xinhua News Agency November 19, 2009)