Students, Student Communities

Neew w T Trreen nddss iin n Y Yoouutthh C Cuullttuurree

The role played by the school is being held in higher and higher esteem by the young, since they spend more and more time there which will practically determine their future careers. The youth are less and less controlled by their family, neighbourhood community and more and more by the consumer industry and the media. The value-system, role models and emerging standards of the youth is determined by this increased independence.

More expectations from the youth means longer school training. In the 1990s a new trend gained ground: the burdens on the young grew generally both inside and outside the school.

According to a 1998 survey carried out in three major towns of different counties, among a full scope sample of 17-year old secondary school students, 37% were engaged in sport activities, 26% studied a foreign language and 22% had private tutors. The majority of these activities took place outside of school. From the aspect of out-of-class activities the students of vocational training schools are particularly passive. Apart from sports, their participation rate in other activ-ities is generally below 10%. One major reason is probably that these occupations, having large-ly left the schools, have become subjects to fees.

The spare-time activities of students tend to leave the institutional frames reserved for the young by the family, school and adult society (cultural and youth community centres, local sport clubs) and is transferred into the businesslike leisure centres (aerobic, body building), places of entertainment (discos) and tertiary industries offering extreme sports.

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Thhee SScchhooooll C Cllaassss

School classes continue to play a key role in the socialisation of students and have a great influ-ence on their general condition and state of mental hygiene. Surprisingly enough, the joy of togetherness and the amiability and helpfulness of the classmates are diminishing as time pass-es, and students of vocational training schools tend to feel more uneasy in their school than stu-dents of other secondary schools. Out of the 5 757 stustu-dents participating in the Health-Behaviour Survey, 5% have complained about the great noise and mess in their school, 5% have been bullied by their classmates regularly and another 3% occasionally.

SSttuuddeen ntt R Riigghhttss

In the 1990s the range of student rights greatly expanded which has also been reinforced on a legal level; it is a general observation, however, that the affected hardly know their individual or collective rights listed in the Public Education Act. A significant proportion of students do not possess the skills necessary to enforce their rights. At the same time, the majority of schools lack the relevant sufficient institutional conditions, and a new approach is still to be formed in order for students to become full-right participants of school democracies. In many cases student rights are only asserted in negligible questions.

By all means, one important measure of the values in a school-level democracy is the extent to which the students are included in the development of school regulations, and to which their opinions are asked for. Domestic rules, for instance, usually do not result from consent, rather they include a mixture of rules of legal and ethical nature.

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Thhee M Meen nttaall H Hyyggiieen nee ooff SSttuuddeen nttss

The burdens weighing on students’ shoulders keep growing despite the fact that the National Core Curriculum has made efforts to limit the weekly number of classes. Research results indi-cate that the number of those students who consider school tasks oppressive and feel that teachers and parents demand too much has increased since 1993. Nearly one third (31.1%) of the participants have held this opinion. Poor achievement at school and the appearance of learning difficulties denote early signs of menaces for mental health. Partial weaknesses of skills (dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia) are not uncommon to remain hidden at school. The lack or delay of assistance might develop secondary personality disorders. According to the statistics, every sixth student has developed some sort of personality disorder in need of correction or therapy. Approximately 20% of children attending schools in Hungary are in one way or anoth-er in danganoth-er. This fact denotes that one fifth of the child and adolescent population, above all the most vulnerable – under the aegis of primary prevention – should be worthy of distinguished attention.

Data collected from nation-wide representative samples have been available since 1986 on the health-related habits of 11–17-year old adolescents. Survey results (1986, 1990, 1993, 1997) demonstrate that, among the health threatening habits of the young, the attempts at smoking and drinking alcohol have been made at an increasingly younger age. The number of those students who devote much of their spare-time (minimum four hours a day) to watching television shows an constantly increasing rate. Only one third of the young practice a

physical-The Inner World of Schools 91

ly active life-style in their free time (on 3-4 occasions and over 6-7 hours per week for sports), the physical activities of another third barely reaches an acceptable level, however, the physi-cal activities of the remaining third is unsatisfactory (the students belonging here do not prac-tice sports more than once a week, if at all). The majority of physically inactive students consist of girls and vocational training school students. 28-30% of students of 15 years of age (boys in a slightly higher proportion) and half of 17-year old students (vocational training school students in a somewhat higher proportion) declared to have or have had sexual relationships, and only 40% of the sexually active adolescents gave an account of using condoms.

A 1995 research involving 17 085 Hungarian secondary school students revealed that 5.2%

of them have tried a variety of drugs; 7.2% have used alcohol and medication together; and 4.2% have used marihuana and hashish. Experts, however, give a much higher estimate of those who have tried at one point of time some kind of narcotics. Vocational training school students tend to fall into the threatened group due to their habits of smoking, consuming alcohol and drugs; also, due to their early sexual activity, and to their negative concept on life (claimed worse health conditions, general conditions and more frequent psychosomatic symptoms).

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Chhiilldd aan ndd Y Yoouutthh P Prrootteeccttiioon n

The Child Protection Act issued in November, 1997 precisely outlines the tasks of the official responsible for child protection, and declares that all teachers and class-masters have to be active participants in the protection of children. Schools, as scenes of prevention, should hold responsibility for the detection of the reasons which place the children’s development at risk and the application of pedagogical means to prevent and counteract harmful effects; and, if necessary, to take steps to prevent or solve the problems.

The situation has been changing at a slower pace than expected and needed since the imple-mentation of the Act. Observations generally show that the necessary conditions are not pro-vided for in the majority of schools. The task of child protection is interpreted as paperwork and it is usually assigned to a staff member of the school. The fulfilment of legal, pedagogical, psy-chological and sociological requirements, necessary for child and youth protection, is not demanded for in reality.

For the present, schools appear unable to handle crisis. According to common observations, the majority of schools endeavour to rid themselves of the problematic child or family as soon as possible, finding excuses in lack of experts, capacity and competence; or actually referring to the interests of the community of children and the school. The freedom in school selection, the demographic ebb, the direct interest of the schools to ensure the highest possible number of students are certainly all factors which increase the interest for the majority of institutions not to assume responsibility for child and youth protection. A relevant study claims that the increas-ingly frustrated schools – due to the pressure for achievement – instead of attempting to bridge the gap between this underprivileged, unfortunately ever increasing mass of children, first send them to the back row, both in a practical and abstract sense, than let them leave the school.

The network of school psychologists, whose establishment was launched only in the mid-1980s, is struggling with a number of problems in approach and in everyday practice. At the end of the 1990s merely 120 psychologists practised their service as listed employees in schools.

Educational Counselling Services – as independent professional organisations – function effectively. This kind of service is usually consulted for ability and talent testing or in case of learning difficulties. Educational counselling has become more intensive in the past 10 years, with the number of clients in Budapest having doubled, from 11 784 to 22 455. Consulting a family pedagogue has not gained ground yet, neither has the recognition of other social experts.

The Child Protection Act attempts to solve the problem with the establishment of Child Welfare Services to be organised in every community. These services are in charge of finding and sum-moning all the competent experts in the interest of each child in need of help. Today, child wel-fare services can only partially live up to these expectations. The effective operation is hindered by the insufficient number of experts and by the lack of time and money. In most communities local GPs, paediatricians, visiting nurses, teachers and local government officials are available for the service. On the other hand, unfortunately, only a few communities have readily avail-able psychologists, teachers for the handicapped, developing teachers or child protection organisations.

The Inner World of Schools 93

Teachers

7.1 E

MPLOYMENT OF

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After passing the law on statutory rights of public servants in 1992, Hungary’s legislative prac-tice regarding the teaching profession conformed with general European standards.

Nevertheless, the practice of employment, dismissal and waging of teachers remained one of the most controversial issues in the economic, administrative and pedagogical processes fol-lowing the change of regime. One of the reasons behind all this can be found outside the edu-cational system, in the income gap conditions between the public and the private sector.

Although it is true that the gap between the two sectors is natural in all economies, it is the width of the gap which is strikingly large in Hungary (and usually in the young democracies of East-Central Europe). Another reason behind the controversy is that the uniform rights of employed teachers laid down in the law mentioned above came to power in a system of shared responsibility. On the one hand, the establishment of the terms of employment and waging for teachers and other school staff, and the continuous updating of these terms applies to a wider public servant sector. On the other hand, as a result of independent financial management and the right, in most schools, to independent financial status, there is no direct connection between central wage-regulation, educational state-funds and local employment and waging decisions.

The so-called normative funding system, set up in 1990, basically links the allocation for edu-cation in the budget (and thus wage-costs) to trends in the number of students, but the school-ing age population dropped drastically in the nineties due to demographic reasons. At the same time, the Hungarian education system lived the days of expansion in a wide variety of forms.

Aside from and despite of decreasing student numbers, the number of educational institutions grew, due to the termination of the state monopoly on schools and to the transfer of the schools’

ownership to local governments. At the end of the nineties students spent more time in the edu-cation system. The number of people employed in eduedu-cation did not change significantly between 1990 and 1997, whereas the total number of people employed in the national econ-omy dropped almost by 30% (about 1.5 million people) during the same period. As a result, there were 248 152 people employed in education in 1999. (This number includes the 44 013 physical workforce employed in the education branch, who make up 17.7% of the total.) In Hungary the index measuring the employment of teachers was very impressing even on an international scale. In 1995 Hungary was ranked first among 18 OECD countries with 4.2% of the total labour force being primary and secondary teachers. The number of teachers required in education is basically a question of student numbers. The unfavourable demographic processes of the nineties were reflected in the data on student numbers: the populous genera-tions born between 1974 and 1978 have already left secondary education by now, and as a result of low birth rates in the eighties and nineties the size of schooling-age population is con-stantly shrinking. The total number of children attending nursery schools and schools, and that 95

In document Educationin Hungary2000 Report (Pldal 88-92)