From Earth to Mars and a curriculum used by the US military: how Verita International School challenges traditional Romanian education

Romanian education is a long time subject of debate, with many accusing the fact that it has declined compared to previous times, while others, a minority among the aforementioned public, trying to find opportunities in the current system of education with all its imperfections. Founder and promoter of such an opportunity is Mr. Richard Joannides, a visionary entrepreneur that has taken upon himself the huge task of presenting the Romanian educational with an alternative, which resulted in the Verita International School of Bucharest. Business Review sat down with Mr. Joannides just as the school, a partner of Dukes Education, the largest private education group in the UK, announced the starting of construction works at the Verita International School & Kindergarten campus within Amber Forest complete suburb.

Right from the beginning, he underlines that the driving force behind Verita consists of two pillars: the social-emotional learning part and the academic part, an aspect that he showed in many interviews.

“Everywhere you look there’s a polycrisis and it seems as if we are rebuilding or breaking down things that have been working for the last 80 years. So the type of change and challenges our children are going to have to face – and I say this from a father perspective with three sons – is monumental, cannot be underestimated. It comes with great opportunities, but if I’m looking at it from a cognitive perspective I think there is going to be a big bumpy road ahead,” explains Richard Joannides.

To put this into perspective, he also adds that we’re still using models of education that are archaic and not really practical even though the world is changing dramatically. As a result, argues the entrepreneur, education and the way we’ve been teaching for the last 100 years has to change.

“I was an outsider in education, I had dyslexia, I had dysgraphia, I didn’t understand education until I was 16-17 years old and I found a great professor, then I flew in life but I’ve been an outsider in education my whole life. And then finally I got into the business world and I realized – oh, my God!, all the skills I’ve been able to create have nothing to do with what happened in school. Zero,” recounts Richard Joannides.

All these being said, he raises an important question: how do we build an educational model that is real and prepares the children for the real world?

Such a question, adds Richard Joannides, is the driving force behind Verita from an educational perspective and the answer cannot be based just on content-driven curriculum.

“It cannot be based on just spoon-feeding content. You don’t remember 90% of what you learnt in class, you don’t understand the relevance of it and you’re not creating critical thinkers,” explains the founder of Verita School.

In contrast, the entrepreneur adds, he and his team found that project-based learning and inquiry-based learning from the United States are the best way to prepare children for the real world.

“The project is the most important. It simulates unpredictability and gets them comfortable with constant change. Chaos,” adds Richard Joannides.

Further on, he even explains how such a practical project actually works.

“There are six projects a year and they last six weeks at the end of which they have to present a project – either 3D model, either build a rocket propulsion system, either navigate the stars and see how to get to Mars and back, maybe show their soil samples from Mars and find out whether it’s radioactive – and at the end take an exam,” shows the founder of Verita School, a name that actually stands for “truth”.

An important aspect of how things work, adds Richard Joannides, is the fact that the children are being split into groups of four.

“The team of four will have for an example in the Mars project, a captain, an engineer, a geologist, a rocket propulsion expert and they have six weeks to build the rocket, come up with whatever rocket schematics they want to have and get to Mars and back safely,” says the entrepreneur.

As for the social-emotional part of Verita’s curriculum, Richard Joannides says that the school doesn’t only teach kindness.

“Kindness is one tool in the toolbox, but I believe resilience is another big one. Resilience is a higher predictor of success than IQ. Being able to regulate your emotions is another being one. That same curriculum that’s based on kindness, self regulation, cognitive skills and resilience, the US military uses,” shows the founder of Verita School.

Richard Joannides concludes by saying that he and his team have realized that kindness, self-regulation being able to control negative thinking and resilience are super-powers and they are actually very interconnected to performance and happiness.

Last but not least, the founder of the Verita International School in Bucharest acknowledges how important was for the school the initial meeting with Gabriela Simionescu, probably one of the first persons to implement private schooling in Romania before the Revolution.

“I don’t know if there were any other kindergartens like the one I have started at home before the Revolution. I knew of a lady who taught French to the children at home, and I used to meet a lady in the Carol Park who spoke to the children in German, but that was all,” explained Gabriela Simionescu.