About two months ago, Maftei, my math teacher in high school, has passed away (fb-maftei). I felt sorry, and that’s why the expression he used to invite us to the blackboard (“iesi pe straße” or “come out on the straße/street”) found its way in the title of this article, which is about the high-school physics teacher Sever Iosif Georgescu and his (or his kids’?) attempts to erase the negative events of his past. This is the third installment in the Georgescu, Iosif SEVER saga:

The first, in Romanian, was the collection of sources on the subject, while in the second I had started telling you about updating Sever Iosif Georgescu hagiographic Wikipedia page.

I wrote in the past about a Romanian Wikipedia contest but I find using and contributing to the English one easier (under another account). For a while, whenever I searched for Sever Georgica (that’s what we called him) on the English one I’d get

Did you mean: iosif seven georges

I guess he’s not yet famous overseas.

So, can we figure out what happened? I think so.

Iosif Sever Georgescu was one of my high school teachers at CNSS (National College St Sava), formerly Nicolae Balcescu Lyceum, in Bucharest. The Romanian education system [see news] is, sadly, both corrupt and corruptive, teaching bribery and plagiarism since the first classes of the primary school. In this sense, Georgica was not an exception, but pushed these practices way farther than most teachers.

general

We often (at least I DO) ask ourselves, how is it possible that a country that allows (or allowed for a few years – I’m not sure if the law is still in effect) programmers to work without paying income taxes still has one of the lowest proportion of such workers in the region according to Eurostat (though we make up in optimism), or how is it possible for a rather large number of students to win prizes at international math, physics or programming contests (but mostly of math – we called Olympiads) while the Romanian student body, as a whole, to be among the worst performers in PISA? Or how can Romania have a reputation for hackers (e.g., Guccifer taxi driver) while having the lowest IT skills in the workforce within the entire Europe? Why do some Romanian students have success abroad, while others are being pulled from school and homeschooled? Are the specialization/stream system and the constant state of reform useful?

Isn’t this early, constant exposure to bribery and systemic corruption a main reason why so many young people still dream of leaving the country and blossoming abroad?!

notions

Let’s start with a few basic notions.

1. Copying someone else’s work and passing it as yours, otherwise known as plagiarism, is wrong whether the author approves of it or not. That’s something I am willing to bet that many Romanians do not know or think it’s an urban legend. I might not have known it myself, have I not had a big chunk of my schooling in Canada, where more attention is given to these issues and copying is not rampant, though it does occasionally happen. So the Andruska episode counts as such even though its “victim”, Professor Jean Grondin, doesn’t really care – or, at least, he did not reply to me when I contacted him about it. Plagiarism in the education system is wrong because the student is not learning much, other than to steal, and is not creating much either. The original author being wronged is a small consideration and it pales in comparison to the damage done to the student’s ethics and moral compass.
2. A teacher should at the very least lose their job and ability to teach if they are found to give prep hours or “after-school” for money (in Romanian: “meditatii”) to students they also teach in the public school system. I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to make it a criminal offense.
3. Gifts should also be outlawed. Anything beyond a card (without cash in it) and flowers should be outlawed. Come to think of it, even flowers could be used by competitive parents, with the poor ones not being to afford it while the well-to-do could be buying expensive, complex arrangements.
4. It is wrong to underpay teachers because it legitimizes and incentivizes the behavior in the precedent point. I do not know what is a fair wage for them and, unfortunately, almost everywhere in the world there is an impression that they tend to be underpaid, but you cannot criminalize their means to get a decent wage without giving them something. There are less and less people interested in becoming teachers, but that could also be absorbed by the demographic bomb.
5. We need to also acknowledge that teacher attitude is a consequence of parental attitude, i.e., beating children (see also Base event on this blog).
6. We cannot change anything or move forward unless we acknowledge and discuss openly the problems of the past and present. Romania also needs to increase its spending on education, as it is now among the last in Europe.

There were a few recent scandals with teachers arrested for requesting bribes at the baccalaureate or from parents. What’s shocking is not that they happen, but rather the audacity and the “matter of fact” manner in which bribes are requested by teachers, the sense of entitlement and shamelessness.

summary

Just in case you missed the previous article(s) on this topic, here’s what Iosif Sever Georgescu has been accused of:

• he insulted and humiliated students and created a climate of fear; he was a poor communicator
• got students to submit his own papers to international contests under their name
• blackmailed students into taking “after-school” prep for money with him in order to pass his [physics] course and implicitly the class
• he forced non-compliant students through discrimination to move to another class to escape his fury
• students revolted many times after 1989 and demanded his resignation, but he had the support of the other teachers and he stubbornly stuck, much like he did with his Wikipedia hagiography

The first similar teacher scandal that comes to mind is the primary school teacher Dana Blându (her last name means “mellow”) who, back in December 2003, was recorded demanding bribes from parents, with impunity, using emotional blackmail and insults. Again, gifts for teachers are common, but what was unusual is how aggressive she was in her demands, going as far as insulting parents for not giving enough and being tight-fisted like lumpen proletarians at what she called a “high-class” school.

wikiupd8

It's mirrored here, just in case the page completely disappears..

Here’s a translated summary of his reasons he's given for deletions, which sheds some light on what’s going on through his head:

• scientific rigour
• legal problems
• personal attack
• personal attack. The one who continuously writes has created the page Zamolxis under the pretest (sic!) that it is my page, this being an infraction and I will sue him for his persistence to denigrate me since 2004. this citizen
• the denigration, personal attack, gossip, slander etc is continued by the one who intervenes permanently in denigratory sense
• he hurts my personality by intervening in my own biography

As you can see, he’s got a fetish for the word “denigration”

Here’s what Georgescu’s account page presently looks like…

…which suggests that his editing powers for his own page have been restricted due to vandalism, after “don’t delete” and “blocked” advertisements. But he keeps doing it anyway. The admins suggested he exercises his deleting muscle in the sandbox. Maybe to him that sounds more like the place a cat uses.

So why waste so much time of energy on this individual (“ipochimen”)? Because, as I’ve said before, he is emblematic for the Romanian education system. The cathartic action of Roxana Iosif, Eugen Russo and their classmates is thusly incredibly important and significant and though back in 2004 I did not have a blog, it’s not too late to give it now the attention and consideration it deserves.

Just in case the source pages completely disappear, I have mirrored the articles about him in a Document (in Romanian) and will slowly translate it into English.

Enough about Georgica, let me finally start with my own story!

Sources / More info: contri-prost, fb-maftei