COMPARATIVE STUDY ON TEACHER EDUCATION IN ROMANIA AND BAVARIA, GERMANY

The problem of teacher education for school education is extremely important for any society, even more important in this days, when the watchword of all governments is "economic crisis". In order to prepare the laborforce of tomorrow's world, highly qualified teachers with specialized trainings are equally required with a pedagogical training, that would facilitate the learning of students in a changing paradigm: teacher-centered education has to be transformed in student-centered education, with all its positive aspects. As a result, the paper aims to give a peek about the present education of the teachers, in a country with a communist past, characterized by a strong centralism - Romania in comparison to the teacher development from an area of stability, consistency and performance - Bavaria in Germany. Thus the comparison will be presented by means of the steps required to form a teaching career in the two regions, showing the strong and weak sides of each system and the solutions which optimize the system, at least in terms of training teachers in Romania, will be advanced. Reasons for choosing this comparative study start from the poor results that Romanian students have achieved at PISA testing compared to the Germans. Experts explain the Romanian failure in these assessments, by contents and educational philosophy different from us, compared to other countries. We maintain an educational frame based on theoretical, rather than applicative and interdisciplinary contents. With the political changes in 1989 and massification of education, educational paradigm has changed considerably. The assessment measured the Bertelsmann Foundation educational system is based on four pillars: learning to know, to do, to be, to live together. Currently, in Romania the fulfill the first objective is only visible: to learn to know. All international studies show that binding of a national curriculum areas are: theoretical-conceptual, applied, interdisciplinary and continuous generating skills training. We have curricula that include only the first area. The main critic addressed in this case to teachers' and specialists who fail to make the shift from theory into a practical plan, from "knowing" to "knowing to do", and we believe that this is tributary for the teachers training system from Romanian universities. We chose Bavaria for comparison because, in Germany this land obtained one the best results from PISA testing in recent years. Therefore, from the experience of training in Bavaria, going to what is now teachers training in Romania, is a new route structure didactic training, which combines strengths of both the educational system and to minimize the negatives current is looked for. In a world where education is one of the most important pillars of the society, the paper also wants to warn on the importance of teachers training, chapter that is less brought for discussions for experts.