Lajos Somogyvári: Hungarian Actors in the Khrushchev-Inspired Education Reform Policy: A Prosopographical Analysis of Hungary’s School Reform Committee (1958–1960)

The Khrushchev-inspired transformation of the school system affected the whole Central Eastern European region and determined pedagogical discourses for years. After the fall of Khrushchev (in 1964), the process stopped and the original goals were modified – in Hungary and everywhere in the socialist bloc. According to the evaluation of the reform after the fall of Khrushchev and the remembrance policy of the Kádár Era, the entire process was to be forgotten. This is definitely characteristic of the actors who participated in preparing decisions: although the School Reform Committee had formulated the main principles of the transformation (translating ideology into pedagogy), its members were barely referred to later, at most in one sentence as a warning. Chosen by party leaders, decision-makers were not mentioned in public in the 1960s or thereafter. In this paper, I briefly outline the historical context and then the theoretical aspects, which have prompted me to employ prosopography; in the second half of the study, an analysis provides a good example of this methodology.

MAGYAR PEDAGÓGIA 117. Number 2. 171-195. (2017)

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