Abstract
The study aims to introduce the memories of Hungarian high school teachers about their professional activities. The main aim is to investigate the experience of being a teacher during the communist era. Based on interviews with eleven retired secondary school teachers from a small town, the study attempts to depict personal life stories and identify altering pedagogical action models formed by history that are dependent on different social and political demands. With the help of the teachers’ memories, the study represents their educational paths and the way these educational professionals see the tasks, the roles, the prestige of their profession as well as the way they experienced their failures, victories, and their active and retired years.
Highlights
Teacher-training schools provided 4+1 year education based on the law of secondary school teachers from 1882
To provide the workforce for secondary school, the former traditions of teacher training were eliminated and the three-year-long educational college was introduced in Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged and Pécs and started operating in 1947–19488 (Romsics 2010, 320; Ladányi 2008)
The prestige of the profession of the secondary school teachers was never questioned in the local community
Summary
The development of the 20th century’s Hungarian intellectuals was defined by several significant turning points throughout history. The memories of the teachers give us an opportunity to study the changes of Hungarian history and their influence on education. Secondary school teachers are active participants of social processes; the influence of their work can be felt much later They cultivate and educate generations, crowds of “civilized individuals”. The oral history provides several opportunities for researchers to analyse the data: the tools of comparative history and content analysis enable us to compare personal experiences with written history within the historical framework of pedagogy In this case, the qualitative technics (content analysis of interviews) gave a chance to know the hidden context and to bridge the individual stories with the official canon. National educational policy at the end of the 19th century supported the towns that did not have secondary schools The ideology of the former progressive, aristocratic liberalism was overshadowed in multi-national Hungary and nationalist tendencies intensified. The more than 100-year-old school survived the several reorganizations of education in the 20th century, and remained a state-owned secondary school all along,
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