Professional teachers’ lives in Hungary during the communist regime (1949–1990)
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of History of Education (RSE)
Beatrix Vincze, University of Budapest
The development of the 20th century’s Hungarian intellectuals was defined by several significant turning points throughout history. Secondary school teachers’ professionally transferring knowledge has always played an important role in the foundation of the intellectual life of the elite. They could form not only the quality but also the existence of the elite. In this study, the examined secondary school teachers were born in the 1930s and 1940s. Consequently, they have had to encounter three intellectual schools of three different political systems during their lives. They spent their childhood in the pre-World War II restricted parliamentary system, which propagated conservative, national Christian values. Hungarian history arrived at a radical turning point after 1945.
Due to the Soviet influence, the communists gradually took over the power and established a one-party system (1948–1949).The Soviet influence determined the history of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The state of Hungary identified with the Soviet communist model. The period was labelled as “socialism” by Hungarians. The socialist era in Hungary consisted of three sub-periods: a transitional period between 1944 and 1949, the establishment of the communist dictatorship between 1949 and 19562, and the third period, the Kádár era3between 1956 and 1988–1989. The following year was a turning point, as, after the change of regime, a pluralistic democracy began (Bihari 1996, 4–5; Romsics 2010, 271). After 1945, with the elimination of the multi-party system, a one-party system was established (1949).
The nationalisation of the factories, banks and mines with-out any compensation and the collectivisation of agriculture assured the further development of the economy. However, the collectivisation of agriculture was success-fully completed only between 1958 and 1961, after the Revolution in 1956 (Romsics 2016). The cultural life had similar transitions. Schools owned by the church (about two-thirds of elementary schools and half of secondary schools) were nationalised too, in 1948. The new politi-cal leadership abolished the compulsory religious edu-cation. The acceptance of the Marxist-Leninist ideology was mandatory in the fields of culture and education.
The intellectual elite of the pre-war bourgeois era, the Christian middle class could not integrate after 1945. On the one hand, the large landowners and the upper middle class had lost their political influence by the late 1940s. On the other hand, the Jewish bourgeoisie and elite, that had played a determined role in the cultural life, fell mostly victim to the Holocaust. After 1945 the aristocrats, factory owners (who were alive and not emigrated) and wealthy peasants were relocated. Their places were taken by the leftist opposition of interwar period and by the young people of worker and peasant families. “Sovietisation” transformed family lives, too. Hungary went from an agrarian-industrial country to an industrialized country within two decades.
The expansion of the education (with the compulsory eighty-year-long basic education) had spectacular results. If we sum up the efficiency of socialist pedagogy (between 1948 and 1989), we can state that illiteracy disappeared, the number of secondary school students has increased about fivefold. Following the Soviet model, the new regime wanted to create a new elite. Higher education supported the schooling of children of poor peasant or working-class origin (Romsics 1999; 2016). The Revolution of 1956 attempted to make a change in the political system but turned out unsuccessful. The fight for freedom in 1956 has been the symbol of Hungarian independence ever since. The greatest loss of the country was the 200.000 people who left Hungary after the revolution (Romsics 2016). If we analyse the political indoctrination, a specific interaction of politics, ideology and education, we have new aspects and results to debate about (Somogyvári 2019, 664–81). The idea of communist education as a modernisation strategy was borrowed from Monica Mincu. The author analysed the Soviet influence and its interaction with western educational patterns in trans-formed and adapted versions. In her perception, the Soviet influence in education should be as an imperialist force and as a voluntary borrowing. She underlined, the communist model cannot be interpreted as a coherent model. The communist states could realise their own answers by internationalisation with local adaptation in the Communist area (Mincu 2020, 319–34).
