Vergangenheit und Gegenwärtige Herausforderungen des Ungarischen Bildungswesens im Spiegel Deutscher Bildungstraditionen und -Reformen

Absztrakt

Since the end of the 20th century, the idea is highlighted that unskilled and under-educated masses in the intersection of educational and social sector can cause serious social problems, disrupt social cohesion and break the visible and invisible protective nets of social solidarity.
This fact prompts the governments of all nations to review their cultural traditions and to try to modernize their education system, making it suitable to meet the challenges of today. The essence of this is that schools need to issue students, who are able to adapt successfully to the “knowledge-intensive” economies of the 21st century in the tertiary and quaternary sectors.
The attitude of the Hungarian society towards our traditions of Hungarian schools and Hungarian educational system is very ambivalent. In case of the traditional Hungarian school, our German cultural heritage is considered valuable. The building blocks of this tradition are reliability, quality, discipline. “The palm tree is growing under load” – goes the saying about the traditional school which is based on the heritage of lexical knowledge, duties and discipline. On the other hand, we regard the same German traditions of our public education system to be bad, because it is very out-dated, very “Prussian”.
In our present study, we would like to follow this ambivalence and point out the bad logic that maintains this contradiction. After a brief overview of our common cultural and educational roots, we also show the orientations of modernizing German and Austrian education policies. After that, we show and justify why it would be worthwhile to follow a few of the modernization elements of the German and Austrian education policy in the Hungarian educational government interventions.