Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - From College Teacher Training to State-directed Teacher Training in Sárospatak
170 SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE Mihály Tóth-Pápai’s work was the first textbook in pedagogy written in Hungarian within the national realm of teacher training took on teaching positions for two to three years in small rural schools to gain practical congregational experience and thus further enrich and enhance their own pastoral studies. On the one hand, these individuals also served the ecclesia which - in addition to maintaining the schools - were able to host ambitious, young teachers with fresh knowledge at the very outset of their careers. The system was best described as temporary; it had advantages and disadvantages. Volatility and the fast incorporation of new knowledge into rural schools had a positive effect. On the other hand, the high degree of uncertainty, the pastor’s position always being subordinated to the associated teacher’s status and the lack of local roots of the new and constantly changing teachers rather worsened school attendance rates instead of improving them and thus also reduced the prestige of the public schools. This system, however, began to lose favour from the beginning of the 19th century. More and more small ecclesia decided to hire a permanent adult teacher instead of having young students coming every two or three years. Typically, the first permanent positions with a small salary appeared in smaller congregations, but, a few decades later, this also became the norm even in larger congregations which could offer better conditions. The classic rector position, nonetheless, remained in a few, larger and wealthier congregations. The church district invited students who finished college to serve for two to three years in dozens of villages. In theory, these student-teachers could earn enough money over the years to pay for their peregrination (study tours abroad). Therefore this type of teaching service is called academia promotio. By the middle of the 19th century most of the small rural schools decided to hire permanent teachers who resided in their area. This required a comprehensive change in the education provided to the teachers, since the system of shortterm employment and rotation of teachers had ensured, at least in theory, the acquisition and passing on of the latest developments in the different fields of knowledge. But the flexibility of the system could no longer be guaranteed. The problem as such took on greater proportions because the amount of information crammed into the curriculums of education programs increased significantly, the influence of the Enlightenment having made the issue of education and schooling a most popular topic within intellectual circles. As a result, from the end of the 18th century on, an ever-increasing number of articles in newspapers, pedagogical plans and new textbooks began to appear. At the end of the reign of Maria Theresa, Johann Ignaz Felbiger organized state-supervised teacher training in terms of a national concept. The so-called normal schools educated and trained teachers only for the Catholic educational institutions. The original course of only a few months duration was expanded into a two-year program which produced many standardized teachers for rural schools. The rigid but uniform curriculum and the common package of textbooks ensured standardized Catholic teacher training. This proved to be most advantageous when compared to the Calvinist system which leaned more towards the respect of individual personality, although, in practice, this was hardly controllable. This situation became untenable, as people in and around Sárospatak relatively quickly realized. It was mentioned earlier that, thanks to Mihály Tóthpápai, pedagogy was part of the college curriculum since the middle of the 18th century and continued to be so, more or less constantly, in the case of the
