The civilization of Romania was the civilization of the West. The names of men and places may be unfamiliar to your eyes. but the people you will recognize as your own kind and their thoughts will be the thoughts of the Christian West.
There is. however. one peculiarity of Romania that requires some preliminary explanation. for it is the very opposite of what contemporary experience in the United States — and. for that matter. in most Western nations to varying degrees — makes us take for granted.
Selected for dehumanization were
A clearly defined group: university students. That was because in Romania. in sharp antithesis to what we see in the United States today. university students were a highly respected elite and included men who combined the vigor and ardor of youth with unsurpassed patriotism and a lucid conservatism. intellectual and religious.
Which will seem so paradoxical
Romania was essentially a land of peasants with limited industrial and commercial classes. The four universities. at Iasi (founded by Prince Cuza in 1860). Bucharest (founded in 1864). Cluj (1872) and Cernauti (1875). each divided into several phone number list faculties (theology. philosophy. letters. science. law. and medicine). were open to all who had completed their studies in a lyceum (liceu. translated ‘high school’ in the present book). The lyceum had relatively high standards. requiring. for example. the learning of French and German as well as either.
Latin and Greek or English and Italian. and weeded out the intellectually incompetent. [15] Only a small fraction. therefore. of Romanian internet archive canada has been working youth entered the universities. and consequently a considerable prestige was attached to the very word student (i. e. university student. since a pupil in a secondary school was an elev). It suggested a considerable intellectual ability and a serious purpose. for the students in Romanian universities were. for the most part. the children of hardworking peasants or of earnest professional men; the scions of the wealthy more often than not went abroad for their education.
To this fact we must add a second
That will be even more astonishing to the American reader. The Romanian universities were as much centers of ardent patriotism and business to consumer marketing conservatism as American colleges. in the period of 1920-50. were centers of internationalism and socialism. The prevailing atmosphere of staunch conservatism also distinguished Romanian universities from other European universities. For this there were several reasons.