Every Child According to Its Pace: School Maturity between Expertise, State Policies, and Parental Eigensinn in Socialist Hungary

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985963%3A_____%2F23%3A00582975" target="_blank" >RIV/67985963:_____/23:00582975 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://hunghist.org/83-articles/872-2023-3-gagyiova" target="_blank" >https://hunghist.org/83-articles/872-2023-3-gagyiova</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.38145/2023.3.461" target="_blank" >10.38145/2023.3.461</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Every Child According to Its Pace: School Maturity between Expertise, State Policies, and Parental Eigensinn in Socialist Hungary

Original language description

It is widely known that socialist states such as Hungary attempted to increase social mobility through a compulsory elementary school system. While the research on socialist education is vast, the relevance of school maturity to an egalitarian education system is still understudied. By the end of the 1950s, lack of preparedness for school among children had captured the attention of Hungarian experts in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy, who were hoping to ensure that first-year students would begin their schooling under roughly the same conditions. In response, in 1965, local initiatives started experimenting with corrective (remedial) classes. The aim of these initiatives was to overcome class differences by offering targeted support and helping children who were less prepared for institutional schooling catch up and transfer into the standard school system later. During the first half of the 1970s, the Hungarian Ministry of Education adopted this pedagogical experiment on a national level. In this article, I put two distinct methodological approaches into dialogue, the sociology of expertise on the one hand and Eigensinn on the other. By doing so, I shed light on the complex interplay of state policies, concepts of expertise, and parental agency. As I show, corrective classes reflected persisting social inequalities, thus children from the lower middle classes and the Roma minority were overrepresented in these classes. Ultimately, I explore how bottom-up initiatives had unintended consequences that were often disadvantageous for the children who were in principle the intended beneficiaries. These initiatives thus worked against rather than for the quest for social equality. In the discussion below, I show how pediatricians, psychologists, pedagogues, and parents shaped the school system, working within, taking advantage of, and thus limiting efforts for social transformation despite asymmetrical power relations.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GX21-28766X" target="_blank" >GX21-28766X: Expertise in authoritarian societies. Human sciences in the socialist countries of East-Central Europe</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Hungarian historical review

ISSN

2063-8647

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

12

Issue of the periodical within the volume

3

Country of publishing house

HU - HUNGARY

Number of pages

32

Pages from-to

461-492

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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