In Defense of Schooling: readings of the crisis of schooling in latesocialist sociology of education in Romania

The paper explores the question of how the crisis of schooling as theorized by P.H. Coombs and more radically Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, was read by sociologists of education and futurologists in late socialist Romania by placing these in the context of debates around schooling that cut across the Iron Curtain.By inserting the debates surrounding the crisis of schooling in state socialist Romania, a country with targeted educational innovation policies directed at engaging with and overcoming the crisis of schooling, the present paper sheds light on a less known side of understanding the crisis of schooling, namely by taking a perspective from within state socialism.The crisis of schooling emerged around 1968 as youth movements were changing the face of education around the world and predicated initially a disconnect between the means of preparing youth for the future and the aspirations of people around the world, as well as the increased knowledge demands of developing socio-economic contexts.However, around this time a second strand of critical intellectual production seeking to radically break with schooling emerged: a tradition that became famous under the headline of Ivan Illich's concept of 'deschooling' but was also an important driving force in Paulo Freire's critique of 'banking education'.In line with Marxist criticism of deschooling from both capitalist and socialist countries, sociologists of education in Romania vehemently defended schooling on the grounds that its inadequacies were perfectible and its social function primordial.However, they also saw in schooling the promise to transform relationships between knowledge production (in terms of research), production processes and education through integrating these three dimensions in schools.As such the article brings context to how the world crisis of education was engaged transformatively during late socialism and thus helps rebalance epistemologically the legacy of unilateral accounts of the crisis of schooling brought about by the end of th e Cold War.Finally, the paper shows how the 'first global crisis of education' was turned into a 'tame' policy issue and how this laid the groundwork for the post-Cold-War tradition of educational governing through crises.