Segregated Schools, “Slow Minds” and “Must Be Done Jobs”: Experiences About Formal Education and Labour Market in a Roma Community in Romania

Abstract

Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study applies the cultural-ecological theory to understand reasons for making and maintaining a segregated school in a Romanian town, and those community forces which track and maintain Roma children there. As findings indicate, creating and sustaining such an institution reflects the flipsides of Romanian national policies, which due to the financing strategies and centralized curricula—involuntarily—block the chances to provide quality education to marginal groups. Tracking and staying of Roma children into such schools is a result of their parents’ ambivalent experiences with formal economic activities and formal education. Experiences with work and schooling shared by this urban group of Roma reveal that parents have clear expectations towards school: transmission of practical knowledge, good treatment and isolation of the school problems from family life, which not always can be fulfilled by the educational units.

“This Is Not Your Santa”: Roma Children Visualize Christmas

“…All Roma children selected for the project also belonged to social categories with specific learning disorders (SLD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. These classifications, which Gábor Eröss calls "medicalization" and "psychologization" of "learning disabilities" and "behavioral disorders" (2012: 177), have unfailingly been linked not only to parents' lack of basic education, unemployed status, and extreme poverty on the fringes of Hungarian society but to the one-sided governmental educational policies (Farkas, 2007;Plainer, 2021;Van den Bogaert, 2019;Zsigó, 2022).…”