Selly (real name Andrei Șelaru) was challenged by Alex Daragiu to play a game of imagination: what would he do if he were the Minister of Education for a few years and what would he change in the Romanian school system.

Selly: "If I were the Minister of Education, I don't think I would have a mandate for a few years, given how often they change. I mean, the average tenure of a Minister of Education is a year and a half, maximum.

In general, in Romania, there's a problem where one comes, does something, and then the next one who comes does the complete opposite. Because everyone says, 'Well, this person did this and that, I'm coming to do something completely different, from scratch, I have different ideas'. But no one manages to see them through.

At least if one had a mandate - I don't know - for five or six years, to be a minister. "Well, okay, everything these guys did was wrong. But I'm coming with a project and I'm going to see it through. And at least after that, I can analyze that project, draw some conclusions. Was it good, was it bad?"

And to answer your question (...) I would first reform the school curriculum. I would exert pressure on other decision-makers to allocate the right percentage of GDP to Education, percentage which is not allocated to this day. And I would focus on digitizing all textbooks.

I would focus on building a state platform where you can have access to everything: from grades to lessons, absolutely everything, all in one place. I would focus on lessons with visual support, with 3D support, etc., so you can visualize what you're talking about. I think you can learn visually much better than through writing or having only textual support.

And I would modify the school curriculum to incorporate subjects that are more closely aligned with the current reality. Whether it's Digital Education, or much more Financial Education, etc.".

Selly: "I think when you go on TikTok or Instagram, you see one world, and when you go to the Romanian school, you see a completely different world.

And because these two things are so disconnected, you get the wrong impression that school won't help you in real life, that you practically learn about one world at school, and you see a completely different world when you leave the house or open your phone, you know?

So, I would make these two things more connected somehow. And you do that by changing the school curriculum, by having much better-trained teachers.

Selly: "Because they have miserable salaries, there's no competition for those positions, no one is fighting to become a teacher, and then poor teachers end up teaching in the classroom.

We have a lot of cool teachers in Romania, but things will never work this way, based on the idea that people will realize that it's cool (to be a teacher) in another country... No, you have to make the profession of a teacher very, very desirable. You do that by significantly increasing teachers' salaries.

(...) You can't rely on having 10% of the workforce, of the teachers, people who are so devoted to the profession and to the cause, that they ignore the fact that they have a miserable salary, that they'll worry about making ends meet, that they won't be able to afford this and that, just because they want to be teachers, to be cool teachers, to educate students. You can't rely on that, because the world doesn't work that way. People work for money".

Alex Daragiu: The Save the Children organization has conducted an analysis showing that this year only 42% of those who started first grade 12 years ago ended up taking the Baccalaureate exam this year. The question is, why do you think we're in this situation?

Selly: Well, I think it's primarily correlated with poverty, for the most part. (...) It's not necessarily surprising. I mean, the better question would be how many of those children who started school in the first grade made it to the eighth grade, the eleventh grade or the twelfth grade. Because, if you see that they didn't make it to the eleventh grade, it's not surprising that they didn't take the BAC (Baccalaureate exam)".

On June 29, 2023, Selly was invited to speak about the mental health of young people at the Public Health Committee (SANT) of the European Parliament.