EDUCATION IN RURAL AREAS – A STATISTICAL APPROACH

Cori­na — Geor­ge­ta DINCULESCU
Insti­tute of Agri­cul­tur­al Eco­nom­ics
Cor­re­spond­ing author: corina.dinculescu @ gmail.com
Abstract: An over­all pic­ture of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem in the coun­try­side reveals that there are still schools that are not con­nect­ed to the drink­ing water and sew­er­age sys­tems, where the toi­let is in the school yard. There are still schools where chil­dren stay in class­rooms dressed up with out­door cloth­ing in win­ter, with caps and gloves, due to inad­e­quate heat­ing and out­dat­ed school infra­struc­ture. The simul­ta­ne­ous learn­ing sys­tem is still in place (due to the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of enrolled pupils, which is steadi­ly declin­ing); this sys­tem does not ben­e­fit pupils, on the con­trary, as these do not have the full atten­tion and guid­ance of the teacher, as is the case in nor­mal class­es, they fail to acquire knowl­edge and skills, like those who study in the nor­mal sys­tem, and thus they are dis­ad­van­taged. Due to the mis­un­der­stand­ing of the major impor­tance that edu­ca­tion has in in per­son­al devel­op­ment of indi­vid­u­als and of soci­ety implic­it­ly, there are not few schools that do not ben­e­fit from fund­ing, sup­port or inter­est from local coun­cils. The local coun­cils do not pro­vide sup­port either in terms of ensur­ing ade­quate infra­struc­ture for a qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion or at least com­pa­ra­ble to that in the urban area – clean class­rooms, endowed with spe­cif­ic equip­ment for each sub­ject of study, equipped with util­i­ties (heat­ing, indoor toi­lets, water), or in terms of sup­port­ing teach­ers in rur­al areas who do not have the res­i­dence there (by pay­ing for trans­port, for instance). Local coun­cils do not find or are not inter­est­ed in find­ing levers to attract teach­ing staff in rur­al local­i­ties. In this con­text, the present paper aims to analyse the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion (lat­est data avail­able) of edu­ca­tion in the rur­al area, using spe­cif­ic indi­ca­tors, in terms of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem resources and population’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in edu­ca­tion, such as: par­tic­i­pa­tion rate in edu­ca­tion, school pop­u­la­tion, by lev­els of edu­ca­tion and res­i­dence areas, classrooms/laboratories/workshops/gyms/sports fields/PC/IT equip­ment, by lev­els of edu­ca­tion and res­i­dence areas, num­ber of grad­u­ates by lev­els of edu­ca­tion and res­i­dence areas.

Key words: edu­ca­tion, dis­par­i­ties, res­i­dence areas, rur­al, urban
JEL Clas­si­fi­ca­tion: I21, I24, I25, R10