Paedagogus Hungaricus Denomination of Teachers in Hungary and Eastern Europe in the XXth Century

Abstract

The Hungarian word pedagogus means people who work as professional teachers in the educational system. Meanwhile the word paedagogus is a common European heritage, which is quite a unique lingual phenomenon. The paidagogos-paedagogus - across the Hellenistic culture, the Biblical use of the word, the language of the patristic age and the later theological and spiritual literature - becomes an abstraction without reference to the word of schools. The modern Indo-European languages consistently use other classical expressions (precepteur, professeur, maitre etc.), or some own original words (teacher, Lehrer etc.). Though the Hungarian language has its original word covering the idea of teacher (tanito); this word is getting to mean in the course of classification of professional education (by ages of pupils and types of schools) teacher, namely the one, who teaches in a secondary grammar school. Its original role has been taken over by the classical paedagogus (pedagogus), instead of other original Hungarian possibilities thanks to a political-historical coincidence. It is surprisingly not a direct classical heritage, but an expression used by the communist party of the new-born Soviet Union, and it was spread by the local communist parties during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after the World War II.