The Hungarian Student, 1958 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
1958-10-01 / 1. szám
quotient never before used. This is the student’s background. The son of a clerk will receive less points for the same answer than an iron worker’s son, whose father may be working in the same factory as the clerk. But there is a gradation within the white collar professions too. If someone’s father is a lawyer or, even worse, owned a small store, that student gets less points for the same answers than, for example, an engineer’s child. The point system begins in high school, and the children of white collar workers grow up in this atmosphere, believing they are somehow branded and knowing that achieving certain things in life is harder for them than for others, or is even impossible. The student’s admission is not assured, however, even if he passes these tests. As we stated before, the State’s momentary needs rudely interfere with the choice of a career. The individual who plans on attending a certain university to prepare for a vocation of his choice is only rarely permitted to carry out his plans. For example, when Russian became a compulsory language in Hungarian schools, there were few Russian teachers available and not enough teachers could be retrained. As a result, students with good scholastic records who had planned to become physicians, engineers, French or literature teachers, were forced to become teachers of Russian. This was accomplished by rejecting the student from the university of his choice and enclosing a form in the letter of rejection which ensured his acceptance at the Lenin Institute, which trained Russian teachers. Creating situations of force and then taking the fullest advantage of them is particularly characteristic of this political system’s concepts. The method seems to work well in practice, but in actuality it fails because the human material used to fill such emergency openings inevitable has little interest in the subject he is forced to study, and less ambition, and will in all likelihood never be an adequate practitioner of his profession. His attitude may deteriorate further, because it may turn out that if he had requested admission two years later he would have been able to pursue the studies of his choice. Quite frequently, due to another momentary shift of goals by the State, there is a shortage in another profession. In such a case it may even happen that in addition to the new human material shunted in this direction, a university student who has already attended a year or two of a course not of his choice can change and start all over again in the field he wanted originally. Such switches are, however, severely restricted, and students graduate and become professionals who feel no real interest in their professions. Indifference and lack of interest characterizes those already established in professions which were forced upon them. Many have tried to guess the motives which lie behind this automatic and bureaucratic selectivity in Hungarian education. There have been many theories, some born of close observation. The basic motivation has probably been best divined by the seemingly paradoxical, but actually valid theory that initially it was not in the interests of the State to put the right man in the right spot. This theory, advanced by Dr. D. J., a specialist in Hungarian cultural matters, appears to be the only logical explanation. He believes that in 1948 it was not university subject-matter or teaching which was essential to the regime, but total support of its ideological struggle. In this situation, all those who regarded their profession not only as a job but as a vocation were suspect from the start, because of the danger that they might fall under the spell of Western science’s “bourgeois ideology,” as a result of personal interest and curiosity. The State feared that as a result, these men, whatever their profession, would support and propagate harmful ideas. The regime’s consistent objection to sons of physicians becoming doctors is well-known, as is the fact that advocating the Weisman-Morgan theory of evolution at medical school amounted to heresy. There is a close connection between these two facts. The physician’s son, who was exposed to possibly heretic medical talk at home, was pushed into agricultural college where, having little or no interest in the subject, he would certainly be satisfied with the knowledge imparted and would not bother to read many unassigned textbooks. The youth showing interest in, for example, literature, was usually shunted, depending on the day’s need, into a technical field. And to ensure ideological conformity, the human material chosen to study literature would be of such background as to necessitate starting with the basic elements of the subject at the university. Thus, the political system instigated a process of automatic counterselection which is a threat to Hungarian youth, depriving them of their inalienable right to free choice of a career. It is also a threat to Hungarian society. What could constitute a greater social danger than forceably increasing the number of people who face their daily work with the feeling of coercion and thus indifference? 12 the hungarian student
