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

He came to Patak in 1851 and a few years later he was elected to the position of professor of mathematics. The same year, he spent a short time studying in Vienna. The experience gained during his stay abroad was of great assistance to him when he organized the teacher training school. In recognition of his hard work in the organizing of the teacher training program, the College elected him to be an ordinary professor of the Academy. After the passing of the Public Education Act, he left the College and became a royal counsellor and a school administrator for Zemplén county. He was a pedagogical writer of significant prominence and author of important textbooks in this era. On a professional level, his ideas were in complete harmony with Eötvös’s Public Education Act. His closest colleague, István Zsindely, was born in 1829 in a village called Priigy (in the Taktaköz region). He studied law and theology in Patak. During the war of ndependence, he served as a member of the national guard. Before he became a teacher at the Teacher Training School, he worked as a teacher in Cserépfalu. Similar to Árvay, he also made good use of his studies abroad to prepare for his new role, having pursued studies in Vienna, Basel, Zurich and Gottingen mostly in the domain of natural sciences. He taught for three years in the teacher training section and then he was moved to the secondary school.

Thanks to József Árvay, the curriculum of the Teacher Training School took on final form. The future teachers followed a progam which included courses of ‘religious studies’, ‘Hungarian grammar and literature’ and ‘theoretical pedagogy’ as core subjects. The theoretical pedagogical subjects constituted a similar proportion of their program. It can thus be said that, along with the practical classes, every fifth class was directly related to their chosen professional orientation. General subjects constituted slightly more than a third of the total number of class hours, the better half of these being natural sciences and the lesser half being liberal arts. Art classes (music, instrumental music, drawing and penmanship) constituted a significant thirty-one percent of total class hours within the curriculum.

The institution also had to cope with a number of different practical difficulties. These stemmed mostly from the fact that, at this period in time, it was highly unusual that students remained within the walls of educational institutions for three consecutive years. Courses of one or two years in duration were the common norm, even in the case of state-funded teacher training schools. But the small, unsupervised public schools often accepted students as teachers who had spent even less time at studies. The leaders of Patak had to face the fact that many students interrupted their studies for years at a time or never resumed them at all if they received an attractive job offer from any of the small congregations. It proved difficult to change this practice, especially during the 1860s and 1870s when small villages struggled to find teachers.

Árvay was dedicated to creating an institution in which, on the one hand, theory and practical studies complimented each other in a healthy balance, thus offering a quality, intellectually stimulating and practical curriculum for the students. On the other hand, he was hoping to make the teacher training program an integral part of the College with enduring traditions as well as having close working relationships with the other faculties. To achieve the first goal, a local ‘practice school’ would have been needed, but, due to financial difficulties, it was never realized, so students had to either travel to small schools in other