Parents’ Voice: The new Hungarian law which chains children to Orbán’s regime

The latest amendments to Hungarian public education laws are threatening the existence of the very popular alternative schools in Hungary using modern pedagogical methods. The new law will also give green light to the authorities to place their own, professionally incompetent people in the chair of an educational institution further damaging the quality level of education. The law will also prevent parents from escaping from the low quality state education system, and will entrust a central official body which lacks the proper competence to judge whether children at the age of 6 are ready to go to school. A faceless, bureaucratic body is not able to make the right pedagogical decisions; that would require local knowledge, flexibility, expertise and personality.

According to the Parent’s Voice Community, alternative schools such as Waldorf schools or other schools using alternative curricula have been very popular in Hungary. These schools use modern educational methods and put an emphasis on personalized skills, project and group-work. There is a very high demand for these alternative schools using creative ways of learning, as opposed to the state schools which are regarded by many as old-fashioned.

However, the latest amendments to the Hungarian educational laws pose new criteria for these alternative schools, preventing them from deviating significantly from the state curricula. The parliament was due to vote on the new law on July 2, 2019, but government decided to delay the voting for a few extra days for additional adjustments to the laws; the extent of these planned adjustments are currently unknown.

The law limits the freedom of the educational institutions in a number of other ways as well.

Teachers, parents and students in Hungary have so far been able to get to know the candidates for the chair of any educational institution and form an opinion about them after looking at their applications and plans. This has so far been a democratic way of expressing their views even if the views of the teachers, parents and students have not been binding and the authorities could ignore them. In the latest amendments to Hungarian public education laws which were submitted in a rush, this right to express views is stripped, and the authorities can name anyone, irrespective of professional competence, in the chair of educational institutions without any professional consultation, so that the citizens of schools will have to passively suffer from whoever is appointed by the state.

Those who have already been appointed as chairs will be closely monitored, and their autonomy is further weakened. They cannot even decide on inviting people to make occasional educational lectures on specific topics without a priori approval from a central office. A head of a school can be dismissed just for organizing ‘improper’ informational activities for students. Under such circumstances it will mostly be the people who are loyal to the regime and who discourage creative ideas that get into the chair positions of educational institutions – no wonder that the new law found it important to provide higher salaries for these positions. These chairs of institutions are likely to expect loyalty from teachers and eventually students making it hard to create an atmosphere of creativity, discovery, critical and autonomous thinking.

Instead, this law will encourage obedience as the main merit in schools.

Besides, the law will prevent parents from escaping from the low quality state education system that is making their children sick, and will prevent parents from creating learning circles where they could study and regularly take exams. A small but growing number of parents have decided to take advantage of the private school status which has so far allowed this possibility. Nevertheless, it is important for all parents to keep this option as a possibility, should we as parents decide that we would no longer expose our children to the low quality education system that is subject to severe shortage of teachers and overwhelms students with unnecessary lexical knowledge.

Instead, parents have so far had the option to create learning circles or engage in homeschooling, providing their children with modern, personalized quality education based on creative methods. The new law will however discontinue this option, which has so far been granted by the head of the educational institution. The new law instead introduces the concept of ‘personal work schedule’, granted by a newly formed central official body based on unknown criteria which are expected to be very strict.

Rather than improving the quality of education, the government instead works on preventing ways for parents by which they have been able to escape from the low quality educational system.