Horia Corcheș, Dilemma: Lolek and Bolek simulate

Today the simulation of the 2026 baccalaureate exam took place. They gave... Wait, why are you jumping with your mouth that the simulation was in a few weeks and that now there are only a few left until the actual exam? It really happened today! The reserve simulation. For the schools where the first simulation was boycotted by teachers, as a kind of preface to a possible strike. I don't know how many schools were in this situation. But not many. However, some of them requested, look, to organize another national simulation for them, with a unique subject. Who will correct? Well, the same teachers who initially boycotted the simulation. So a correction at the school level, not randomized, on the official national platform.

I'm not saying that teachers don't have reasons to be dissatisfied. The Romanian school consumes people through salaries, bureaucracy, instability. The problem is not dissatisfaction. The problem is the form it takes when, out of a desire to show that you no longer participate in the game, you ask, in a few weeks, for another round of the same game, just for you.

The boycott has a logic if it produces a clear, assumed, oppressive absence. If you say: I won't enter the mechanism, because the mechanism needs to feel my absence. But when, after you have refused the simulation, you request a replacement simulation, with a unique subject, with special organization and local correction, the message becomes convoluted. It no longer resembles a protest, but a rescheduling. It is no longer an act of strength, but a kind of "I was absent for a good reason, when can I take the test?".

Obviously, at the center are the students. They need to know where they stand, what they don't master, how much they still have to catch up. The simulation is not sacred, but it can be a useful thermometer. Only that here the absurdity appears. In the name of a cause for the teachers, you deprived the students of a common exercise, then, still in the name of concern for the students, you ask for the exercise to be redone. You tell them that your absence is necessary. After that, you explain to them that your presence is, after all, indispensable. It is a pedagogical-union dance in two contradictory steps: one, hasty, the other, slow.

I remember Lolek and Bolek. Not because the two would have had any blame in our school unionism, but because the situation seems like an episode of a silent cartoon, with two determined boys who set out to block a bridge, they block it, congratulate each other, after which they realize that they actually had business on the other side. And then, with the same seriousness, they build another bridge, as a backup. Not one of stone, sturdier and more beautiful, but a smaller, more improvised one, perhaps even more crooked, but theirs. Only that, in real life, students cross the bridge, not drawn characters.

There is also the issue of correction. If the national simulation has a meaning, it lies in the idea of a minimum comparability. Randomization and correction on the platform at least create the healthy impression that the student's work does not return, like a trained dove, exactly to the nest from which it left. When the correction remains in the school, the exercise becomes more familiar, perhaps more comfortable, but also less relevant. The student no longer finds out how they are viewed by an outside corrector, but how they see themselves, probably, the same small universe.

I know, it can be said that it is better than nothing. That is true. In education, "better than nothing" has long become a public policy. We have programs better than nothing, platforms better than nothing, reforms better than nothing, evaluations better than nothing. Only that, at some point, from all these reasonable improvisations, a great nonsense accumulates.

Perhaps a strike, a protest, a boycott are sometimes necessary. But they need to know what they want to say. Otherwise, they end up speaking in two voices, like Lolek and Bolek in an administrative version: one pulls the system to stop, the other asks it to start again, but only for the schools that have remained in instability. And the students, in the meantime, are looking at the clock. For them, it is no longer a simulation. It is almost an exam.

Horia Corcheș is a writer and a professor of Romanian language and literature. The most recent book published: A yellow dress, like a well-ripened lemon, Polirom Publishing House, 2022.

https://www.dilema.ro/pe-ce-lume-traim/lolek-si-bolek-simuleaza