The Many Troubles of the Bulgarian system

I’ve heard it many times: the Bulgarian educational system is rigid, outdated and requires a solid amount of reforms. I’ve said it as well, since I was a product of that system for 12 years. However, it never crossed my mind that a teacher can get fired for wearing jeans on the job, not looking like an adult, or for sitting on the desk while talking to students. This is exactly what happened to Maria Pencheva, a 35-year-old Bulgarian who now works at the Panitza library of the American University in Bulgaria where she enjoys not having anyone impose constraints on her personal style.

Maria has always been fond of everything related to America. After graduating with English Philology from the Southwest University in Blagoevgrad, she went on a work and travel program in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

“This is where I fell in love with the States,” Maria says.

In fact, she started to consider relocating her family there, and did not want to come back to Bulgaria at all.

Her main problem with the Balkan country was that she was perceived as different, unusual, even weird at times. In the States, Maria was just a human being, like one of the many others around her.

“I don’t mind it,” she says.“This is my personal style and I know there are people who will accept it without any trouble.”

One of those people is Vladislav, her husband, who is also the father of her 2-year old daughter, Lidiya.

After coming back to Bulgaria, Maria applied for a job as an English teacher in one of the local schools in Blagoevgrad. On a typical workday she wore jeans – a normal attire for a 26-year-old freshly graduated student. However, her principal was not as open-minded and decided to yell at her in the hallway while everyone else had class. Maria’s natural reaction was to suggest a better place for those sudden constructive critiques.

“So I got fired for being too opinionated.”

Reasons like that are why Maria calls the Bulgarian educational system “archaic”:

“The system is managed by narrow-minded people. The information that is included in the textbooks is too complicated for students to understand.” 

Her increasing discontent with how young children are being taught in Bulgarian schools lead Maria to doubt whether this type of education would help her daughter develop at all.

“I should take my daughter out of this [educational] system. They way to do that is to go abroad. I would like her to have this out-of-the-box way of thinking, which I don’t think she will manage to develop here in our country. So I think that for a brighter future for my daughter she should live abroad and study there.” 

Regardless of how morbid that sounds, this is how the majority of young people I’ve spoken to think. Myself included. I wanted to avoid in any way the possibility of attending a Bulgarian university exactly because of the outdated mode of teaching. Seems like me and Maria both found what we were looking for at AUBG: she found a place that reminded her of the US where she’d like to move for good, and I found my way of getting a quality non-Bulgarian education within the territory of my country.

Check out the video below to hear Maria talk about her struggles while working at the AUBG Library, plus a slideshow to get a closer look of her world.

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