Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD
199 movement. The better part of his career was defined by his achievements in the nurturing of talent. Experts familiar with this field agree that the first chapter in the history of the caring of talented students in Hungary began at the turn of the century and finished with the death of the emblematic László Nagy in 1931. Nagy was an internationally recognized leader of a child-study program which was introduced in Patak by Károly Lázár. Surely, Lázár played a significant role in familiarizing Harsányi with the program and also later in his emerging to be a national leader. The second chapter of the development of this body of knowledge in Hungary is directly connected to Harsányi. Lrom 1935 onwards, he started to introduce the most important elements of caring for talent, these being the purposeful evaluation of students, their selection and their differentiated instruction. His methods were soon implemented in the Reformed Church College of Debrecen and other Calvinist schools. In 1941, the movement began to receive official governmental support. At the same time, the state established a fund for protecting talented students in the rural regions whose purpose was to prevent poor students coming from rural areas from not attending secondary schools due to lack of finances. Harsányi was already working in Budapest when he succeeded in further developing his unified concept of protecting talent to the point where it could be implemented anywhere in the country. He had incorporated some new concepts, for instance, that of a child, who is capable of working alone on a particular problem at a deeper level or at multi-faceted tasks, and that of a supervising teacher who closely monitors the child and is responsible for providing the child with the appropriate multi-faceted tasks so that the child is constantly challenged. This notion demanded almost unimaginable effort and initiative from both the student and the teacher during the 1930s, when - much as in the 1950s-60s - education was heavily tainted with ideologies and little more was expected of the school than to pass on a unified curriculum which the students were to automatically memorize. Harsányi’s pedagogical expectations were considered to be truly progressive even in the slowly ebbing restrictions of the Kádár era. SPIRIT AND MOOD ON THE TRADITIONAL PATH -THE HUMANITIES SECTION OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL AND THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION The life of the secondary school in the 1920s was mainly defined by the renewal of an old debate. In setting the curriculum for secondary schools for the 1924-25 school year, the MNER once again issued an ultimatum to Patak inquiring if Patak wished to follow the classic secondary school model or the secondary school for modern sciences model. This same question had been a constant problem for Patak during the previous century. The traditions of the institution and the functions of the theological school clashed more and more with the broader needs of those who attended the school. More and more people complained
