Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - Back in the hands of the Church again - the Golden Age of the Teacher Training School
210 THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MARGINALIZATION The plan for the church to retake possession of the Teacher Training School seemed like an increasingly plausible scenario as its elements collided less and less with the state’s education policy. Klebelsberg’s cultural policy imposed huge financial sacrifices on society and on the state budget while the distance at which the state kept itself from churches was significantly less, both in intellectual and content-related matters, than in the previous years. Thus the state did not oppose, neither for financial reasons nor for philosophical reasons, the efforts to reclaim the school, yet many years had to pass before the details were clarified. The notion of repossession was raised immediately after the loss of the Academy of Law but a number of obstacles, including economic difficulties, hindered the process. At first, the church district tried to cope with the different challenges by itself. An imposed progressive cultural tax was planned which would not have been mandatory as such, but would have rather urged the people to contribute through social education. Bishop Kálmán Révész offered fifty million crowns a year but his generous example was not followed by too many others. The 25th reunion of the alumni of the Teacher Training School in 1939 Therefore, many years had to pass before the idea of repossession became reality. The Teacher Training School was returned to the church in the summer of 1929. The transition proceeded without difficulty. The buildings, their surrounding areas and everything on them were handed over by the state for fifty years on the condition that should the church be unable to finance operations, the state could retake control at any time. The school continued to receive state subsidies which meant that the school had to continue to employ teachers of other denominations and admit students of other denominations. In the ensuing years, the Reformed Church presence became more significant, but it did not become exclusionary. In the years prior to reclaiming the school, the proportion of denominationally Reformed students was fifty percent which later increased to close to seventy percent. In addition to the denominationally Reformed, Roman and Greek Catholic students attended the school in relatively large numbers. At the outset, there existed a unique relationship between the College and the Teacher Training School given that the latter never formally became part of the College. The church district continued to treat the two schools separately when dealing with financial matters, viewing the Teacher Training School as the
