Former le citoyen: la lecture roumaine d’un objectif europeen

Abstract

The first decades of the Romanian 19th century are characterized by the struggle of some significant classes of the society that keep on trying to affirm and impose their own conception of an European ideal, that should be modern and progressive, in opposition with the barbarian and despotic ottoman orientalism. The essential purpose of this approach is with no doubt a political one. But the temptation of a political revival passes through the necessity of a new social construction of which the main promoter is a new social subject, a citizen-subject, educated in the spirit of the European values of the time. Thus the education, the instruction and the school itself become the most important vectors of this renewal. The interest shown to these fields already has some very good previous antecedents. Since the middle 18th century in accordance with the Enlightenment European ideas, the Phanariots princes had been willing to exploit the political virtues of the public education of which levels fit closely to those of the social hierarchy. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Enlightened Europe become the tacit or explicit model of all those tempted by the renewal of the ancient structure. The social and political restructurings that were taken into account did not suffer any major changes but the reorganization of consciences. In the Principalities, the basis of the entire elementary public education was represented explicitly by the Christian morality. The homeland, as a motherland, substitutes the family in order to develop young people education, so that its uniformity could ensure the public harmony and happiness. The security of the government is based on raising citizens up and their enlightenment. This ideological option can also be found at the level of public education administrative rules and programs for which notions opposite either to Orthodox belief or political authority were prohibited to be taught. The fundament of every public institution is the moral doctrine of which purpose is to give birth to pious Christian, faithful citizens who are useful to their homeland. In the middle of 19th century, Man had to have had a special and useful role in the society and that was a general rule and idea. So the education must fit to social needs and thus it must be differentiate accordingly to the social roles that are ideally assumed by each individual. Together with both some certain influences which don’t reveal their sources and some clear theoretical references to the general European pattern, there was a practical constant concern of assuming it. In the first decades of the 19th century, the first public scholarship beneficiaries were sent to foreign schools (in Italy and then in France). These scholarships were granted on one condition: beneficiaries had to return to their country and make a teaching career so that they could do that in accordance with the occidental European pattern in order to make a connection between the Romanian system and the foreign one. In the middle of the same century, local authorities within the Principalities were thinking to send as scholarship beneficiaries the most gifted orphans raised on State expenses. The dream of a European model goes beyond the administrative field and spreads over through private individuals. At the end of the century, Ion Ionescu de la Brad founded an agricultural school for orphans inspired by similar models seen in France and Switzerland. Those schools were factually claimed by the new scientific and positivist philanthropy which had a lot of supporters in Romanian culture especially among doctors (hygienist movement).