“You could say that 30 years after the regime change in ’89, we’ve gone back in time as far as textbooks are concerned. We’re in the same situation we were in during the communist regime.”
This is summed up by the president of the Hungarian History Teachers Association, László Miklósi, when asked about recent changes in his country’s education system.
Since coming to power in 2010, right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán has been centralizing power around himself and his party, Fidesz, and taking away autonomy from the judiciary, the press and, more recently, schools and universities.
President Jair Bolsonaro made this Thursday (2/17) his first official visit to Hungary. In a statement to the press, he said that there was an ideological proximity between the two countries, which, according to him, would represent values such as God and family.
“I consider your country to be our little big brother. Small if we take into account our differences in their respective territorial extensions and big for the values we represent that can be summed up in four words: God, Fatherland, Family and Freedom,” Bolsonaro said.
In 2019, the Hungarian government took control over the country’s public schools from the municipalities and replaced the books previously published by different independent publishers with works by the Hungarian Institute for Research and Development in Education (OFI, in its Hungarian acronym).
The area of history was one of the areas that generated the greatest concern among teachers. In the opinion of Miklósi, who has taught classes for more than three decades, the content was compromised to fit the nationalist ideology and worldview of the prime minister and his group.
“In the days of communism, schools only used books published by the state – and these were full of ideological content”, he pointed out in an interview with BBC News Brasil.
“There was a change of regime, there was a market for textbooks, with diversity, a plurality of publications. And now we are back to that scenario in which schools can only use books published by the State, full of ideological content.”
The teacher cites some examples.
One of them involves the very foundation of Hungary. According to the most accepted theory, 895 nomadic Hungarian tribes arrived in the Carpathian Basin “pushed” by the attacks of other nomadic tribes that were conquering new territories.
“But this narrative is not glorious enough for government ideologues,” says the professor, ironically. “So the books simply omitted that information.”
In the chapters on medieval history, he adds, some of the content is reserved for monasteries and female saints, portrayed as examples of what Hungarian women should aspire to be.
“And there is a strong emphasis on military history, as opposed to history that portrays ordinary people, what their lives were like. This was a trend that had been gaining prominence until the arrival of the current regime and that was put aside to once, give way to an official narrative”, evaluates the professor.
The “patriotic” message also interferes with the way immigrants are portrayed. Shortly after the adoption of government-sponsored textbooks, a CNN report called attention to a history book for high school students that featured speeches by the prime minister about the “dangers of migration” and in which he claimed that Hungary was a “homogeneous” country.
The attack on immigrants is recurrent in the speech of Orbán, who in 2015, at the height of the migration crisis that brought millions of refugees to Europe, ordered the construction of a controversial iron fence on the border between Hungary and Serbia to prevent migrants from crossing the border. Hungarian territory.
Problems with textbooks go beyond ideological issues, says Átlátszó, a nonprofit organization that monitors the country’s public sector. In a report published earlier this year, the entity draws attention to a series of “practical” errors in the new history books, such as the location of cities on maps.
In its official statements, the government justifies the control over education on the grounds that the municipalities lacked structure and states that the changes are part of a strategy for the sector to gain efficiency and be better financed.
The new school curriculum and attacks on teachers
A year after changing textbooks, in 2020, the government also changed the school curriculum. The idea was to make it more “patriotic”.
Miklósi was publicly critical, especially in relation to the orientation for history teachers not to talk about the battles lost by the country in the past, only about the military victories.
“I became public enemy number one at the moment,” he says, referring to the attacks he began to suffer from the pro-government press.
“For three months, every two days something came out criticizing me, saying that I just wanted to teach young people about the battles that the Hungarians lost.”
In the 12 years that Orbán has been in power, freedom of the press has been gradually curtailed in the country.
Today, the vast majority of media outlets are directly or indirectly aligned with the government — more than 500 are part of a public foundation created in late 2018.
With the exposure in the news, Miklósi says he received a series of threats by email and by phone. “This carries enormous emotional weight.”
Afraid of the repercussions, there are many who prefer to remain silent, he says, citing the case of two history professors who, after criticizing a government-funded video extolling one of the military achievements of the Hungarian past, became the target of media attacks. .
“For two days, they were after them, a hate campaign so intense that it made them not open their mouths to give a professional opinion on anything.”
Loss of autonomy of universities and research centers
Political scientist Zsolt Enyedi, a professor at the Central European University (CEU), was directly affected by the “crusade” in education.
In 2018, the university had to leave almost all operations in Budapest, the capital of the country, and move them to Vienna, capital of neighboring Austria.
More extreme, the case of CEU was atypical, explained by the fact that the institution was financed by Hungarian billionaire George Soros, one of the “enemies” elected by the prime minister.
Soros is accused of funding entities allegedly interested in promoting mass immigration and destroying the country. Orbán’s 2018 re-election campaign even put up billboards with the philanthropist’s photo and the words “Let’s not let George Soros have the last laugh.”
The changes in education began just after the last election, in the prime minister’s third consecutive term.
“Orbán didn’t change education in the first two terms. He just took a lot of money out of the budget, directed to areas like sport. It was as if he accepted that education would always be managed by people with a certain level of autonomy, who might think differently. him”, reports Enyedi.
“But after winning two elections and securing a constitutional majority in Parliament, he decided to interfere in education as well.”
In primary education, administration has been transferred to many churches, some whose summit is close to the prime minister.
Higher education and scientific research also lost autonomy. In recent years, the government has promoted a kind of privatization of higher education, transferring control of public universities to private foundations with boards made up of government-appointed members, often former ministers or businessmen with ties to the prime minister.
In July 2019, thousands took to the streets of Budapest to protest a newly passed law that allowed the government to control more than 40 institutes linked to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as reported by the journal Nature at the time.
In September 2020, the capital was once again taken by thousands of protesters against the loss of autonomy of the University of Theater and Cinema, at the time the seventh that would be managed by a foundation linked to the government.
In April of this year, Hungary undergoes new elections and, for the first time in more than a decade, Orbán will face a unified opposition. Opinion polls reflect the polarization of Hungarian society, with rival Peter Marki-Zay well positioned.
The CEU professor draws attention, however, to the fact that, even if Orbán and his party, Fidesz, are defeated at the polls, some of the changes made during his administration are not easily reversible. Many of them were enacted into law and included in the Constitution, thanks to the majority the prime minister has enjoyed in the legislature.
In the case of universities, he exemplifies, the council members a priori have lifetime positions.
“Now that he has complete control over society, Orbán believes he can build an institutional framework to enlist new generations in his ideology — he tries to build something that will outlast him.”
