Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MARGINALIZATION- BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II. - Environmental conditions - Education policy in the spirit of the cultured-nation concept
185 teachers to study abroad and the systematic efforts to broaden bilateral cultural relations were all an integral part of the ‘cultured-nation’ concept. And as it will be seen, Klebelsberg’s strategy in this respect was in perfect harmony with that of Sárospatak. Mention must also be made of the policy of this era as it pertained to secondary schools. It was a strange contradiction that although the government spent the least amount of money and attention on this educational sector, the measures implemented here resulted in more structural and content changes than anywhere else. Klebelsberg’s new secondary education reform introduced a new type of school. Adding to the existing Secondary School and Secondary School for Sciences and Modern Languages categories, he created a third category called Secondary Schools for Modern Languages, Sciences and Latin. The curriculum was based on Latin and the humanities but the traditionally strong emphasis on Latin, Greek and history-related subjects was dropped. Instead, more attention was dedicated to Western European languages and cultural studies which were related to these languages. This new type of school played an important role in the era in question, especially in Patak, where even the Minister of Culture considered the English Residence as the prime example of the new type of school. In the history of secondary school education, a new chapter started when Bálint Hóman became the Minister of Culture. The new law on secondary school education in 1934 eliminated the three different types of secondary schools and introduced a unified form. Latin and German were the compulsory foreign languages, but, in the fifth year, students had the option of not studying Latin and substituting it with other science classes. The law let local schools decide whether they wanted the third language to be Greek, French or even English. As a result, in most secondary schools, the students were divided into classes according to the languages they studied instead of attending separate institutions as before. Hóman also created a possibility whereby the various economic schools could start operating on their own, which in reality breached the idea of unified secondary schooling. The numerous extensive and - intensity-variable, yet always present - intensive reforms in education had two important aspects. The first was that the education system remained socially selective. Vain efforts were made at governmental levels to augment rural schools; rural cultural centres were created and regardless of how many people turned their attention towards rural education - especially in the vicinity of Sárospatak - the elite nature of higher education was difficult to change or even dispel. Poor, rural children could only get into secondary schools or into higher education if they were exceptionally lucky and thus these upper levels remained the privilege of the elite and a small number of middle and upper class citizens. Furthermore, the ‘numerus clausus’, which negatively affected the Jewish believers since its implementation in 1922 and still did so in its various forms and degrees, had even worsened the previous average ratio. The second aspect was the curriculum, the gradual change of the content of education and, parallel to this, the stricter supervision or monitoring of the teachers and the schools. In reality, there was a linearly accelerating trend between the two World Wars to anti-intellectualize education. Covert military training became increasingly widespread among students and included doubling
