Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)

János Ugrai: „THE PERIOD OF NATIONAL ADVANCEMENT” 1777-1849 - Environmental conditions - The spirit of the age: from the enlightenment to the fall of the war of independence

78

FROM THE ENLIGHTEMENT

TO THE END OF THE WAR

OF INDEPENDENCE

scarcely resembled other schools of their own denomination. In pursuing the logic of school systems designed from top down, they insisted on maintaining the specific features of each school centre (schola mater) along with the elementary schools and the network of ’’particulas” or ’’filias” connected to them. It was thus largely due to the Protestant colleges and lyceums, generally with higher than average standards, that a school system which is uniform, transparent and easily verifiable and controllable by the sovereign could not be developed in Hungary by the first half of the 19th century.

In contrast to this, the Roman Catholic schools all functioned according to a set of identical regulations as prescribed by Ratio Educationis II. This same Ratio Educationis II also mandated that ideas of education reform be contained and stablized. Only a small fraction of the original goals of the Enlightenment or Neohumanism were realized. From the perspective of content and methodology, schooling was dictated by the continued survival of church traditions. The ordinary school curriculum continued to be dominated by literacy in the classics and by subjects such as the Latin language and those pertaining to theological philosophy.

The network of institutions stabilized by Ratio II was heavily weighted towards secondary schools. Even within a European context, a most respectable number of secondary schools were well-established within the country, (in the final years of the 1820s, there were twenty to twenty-five thousand students enrolled in one hundred secondary schools.) In comparison, general public education lagged behind the expectations of the age both in quantity and in organization. At the beginning of the Age of Reforms, four to five thousand elementary schools operated and were attended by some three hundred fifty thousand children. However, this relatively large number obscures to some extent the true situation, given that a significant majority of children attended school for only one or two years and for only a few months within that period. In these circumstances, most of them never learned to read or write with more than minimum competence. Even their teachers were of very varied levels of preparedness. Education for girls, trade schools and university education represented only a very narrow cross-section of schooling existent at the time. Thus the school system’s offering at the lower and upper levels fell far short of the already conventionally available numbers in Western Europe. At the same time, there was an overrepresentation of secondary schools which inculcated traditional culture. All this suited the interests of the elite in a society which was organized according to class differences and feudal concepts.

There were sporadic attempts to change the situation described above in the years between 1820 and 1840. By incorporating institutions which had already been founded, the framework was created for the educating of pre-school and school teachers as well as providing pre-school progams and vocational training at the secondary and tertiary levels. Individually significant endeavours, however, remained but scattered initiatives and no directive force of any consequence appeared which would push for a needed change at the level of the system itself. Thus, it was only the slow development of public schools and the appearance of engineering and agriculture-profiled, technical, lower level secondary schools which embodied developments until the middle of the 19th century. In light of this, it can be said that the Hungarian school system hardly changed during the