The governance of the educational system between the state policies and the confessional exigences

This work is part of the doctoral thesis with the same title, written under the guidance of Professor Marius Profiroiu, Ph.D., publicly defended in 2019 at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies.

The idea of a multidisciplinary approach was born from the desire to model a research using all the pieces compiled and polished by the author during the study of four distinct areas of competence: management, public administration, theology, and art.

The first part of the book is dedicated exclusively to the general theoretical approaches regarding the governance of the religious and theological education system and includes a series of conceptual clarifications on the definition of governance, scientific theories relevant to management and public policies, models, typologies, and distinctive features.

The second part is reserved for another original contribution of the author: the investigation of the concrete functioning of governance within the theological education system in a geographical area of Romania.

The importance of the research topic lies primarily in its pioneering status, as it is the materialised expression of the first investigation made among the beneficiaries of theological education, on the internal and external factors that can influence the choice of a theologian career and human and professional preparation for such very private service. The second element, of a higher importance, that has generated the choice of the quantitative research topic, is the major stalemate faced by some educational structures in the theological field in terms of the number of young people willing to accept such a challenge, and then be able to complete it in a satisfactory way on all of the three implicit levels: personal, social, and religious. The major difficulty of the research was related to data collection, the author using exclusively her own resources (in the context of low transparency of the religious environment), herself being a graduate of the Orthodox Theological Seminary and the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, and familiar with the Orthodox theological education institutions.