Eötvös Loránd University
Faculty of Education and Psychology Educational Studies Graduate School
Educational Studies Research Training Programme
Doctoral (Ph.D.) dissertation abstract
Primary school years and historical time – Content analysis of narratives about
primary school years in the 1950s
Supervisors: M. Dr. Mária Nádasi Author: Nedda Kolosai Dr. Antal Bugán
2012
Table of contents
An overview of the research The problem
Research objectives The research sample Processing method Results
Literature referenced in this summary (in Hungarian)
An overview of the research The problem
There is what seems to be a universal and continuously growing interest in works that reveal or represent the most recent and the not so distant past, a period that was the personal experience of an ever-decreasing number of our contemporaries (Romsics, 2008). The witnesses’ personal involvement, and the memories that are experienced, recalled and (re)constructed differently by each individual, call for a particular attitude and approach on the part of the researcher. The study of history as it reaches into the present reveals that the period that ends with the present is marked by parallel histories, such coexisting interpretations of the past that may be completely at odds (Szabolcs, 2006).
There are sundry discussions of the 1950s and education in that period, the treatments varying along the openly acknowledged or less overtly avowed values of ideologies, social sciences and pedagogy. While this diversity has not resulted in distinctly opposed histories, differences did emerge, a scholarly dialogue about which is warranted by two considerations (Golnhofer, 2006). One is the content of the discussions in question, the other an epistemological or methodological aspect. The latter issues, made particularly interesting by the postmodern challenges, have barely influenced educational historiography in Hungary, when in fact no useful discussion of the past, of its description and interpretation, can emerge without designating the related problems and proposing solutions (Golnhofer, 2006).
Katalin Kéri (2008) suggests that, in addition to identifying the official concept of the child, it is crucial that we learn about the actual possibilities of the 1950s, the personal experiences of those who lived then, their day-to-day life. Studying the education of the 1950s from a different perspective, Erzsébet Golnhofer (2004) notes that a more in-depth understanding of the period requires knowledge of formal and informal beliefs, the latter hitherto unexpressed.
Informal knowledge is, above all, one’s personal experience, or the experience of one’s close acquaintances (Mikonya, 2006).
The reconsideration of historiography, a process set in motion by the postmodern approach, is founded on re-evaluated historical knowledge, i.e. a continuous reinterpretation. Our knowledge of the real world is mediated, as is most information; experience is marked by contingency; reality in its entirety cannot be known completely, our image of it always fragmentary. As a consequence, the knowledge we gain of the referential reality that can be known in this way is essentially constructed. Theories that consider recollection and the attendant collective memory, as well as the knowledge of the historiographer, as constructs, rely on the position that our knowledge of the past is the result not of reconstruction but of construction (Gyáni, 2010), and that the resulting constructs are of equal value. We are, in other words, to accept the parallel existence of different stories, interpretations, dictions and perspectives (Golnhofer and Szabolcs, 2005; Rapos, Gaskó, Kálmán and Mészáros, 2011).
Karl Popper (1997) goes as far as to say we write the history we are interested in. He thinks the choice of facts to be treated on is to a great degree already a question of personal judgement. Mihály Polányi argues that every act of cognition includes the implicit and passionate approval of the person who performs the act. This is not simply an imperfection but a necessary part of every act of cognition (Polányi, 1994). Popper thinks history has interpretations. Every generation has the right to look at, and reinterpret, history in the manner they think fit, adding to the interpretation of the previous generations. This is because the past cannot have a story that describes what actually happened; not one of the interpretations of history may be definite (Popper, 1997).
“[M]an is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, [and] I take culture to be those webs...” This idea by Clifford Geertz (1994) also serves as the motto of my
dissertation. Geertz suggested an essentially interpretative approach to cultural anthropology, an approach whose currency owes much to postmodernism. In such an approach, man can be interpreted in the web that holds and surrounds him. The webs of significance cannot be unravelled completely, but they can be pointed out; the various social or cultural webs of significance can be highlighted from specific vantage points (Geertz, 1994), such as the lifeworld of the school as culture, and its different manifestations over history (Szabolcs, 2011). Greetz’s method of treatment is the so-called thick description, a detailed study of the contexts of individual phenomena (Szokolszky, 2004).
Using day-to-day life as an analytical category facilitates the presentation of a social structure as a living practice, makes it possible to look at this concept as something than can be convincingly grasped through the fact and mode of reception, first and foremost through the diverse manifestations of representations (Gyáni, 2010a). The subject of microhistorical research is daily life itself, as well as its actors, ordinary people, together with their object culture, life practices, and mental universe: banal things that history overlooks, if history is understood as the story of the elite, the events and institutions that define the politics of states (Gyáni, 1997). Microhistories sometimes reveal more of the past than general evaluations;
they are closer to the human dramas, and beside necessities, they are also sensitive of chance.
They uncover more of the motivations of those who participated in, and recollect, an event, showing their particular experiences. They offer a more personal vision of history, turning research into a magnifying glass that brings out small but significant details (Feitl 2001, quoted in Gyáni 2010a).
This dissertation shows how the most recent trends in historiography have influenced educational historiography, and what consequences this has had on the diversity of scholarly approaches, and the variety of methodologies used in the processing of empirical materials.
Narratives, oral history, the stories taken from life, add detail, nuance and complexity to the longue durée (Koselleck, 2003), or, macrohistory. They help us to have a more complete and accurate view of the day-to-day life of the institutions and the people who lived in the period in question (Gyáni, 2000). Microhistory is the history of silence; the history of education must dig into a great deal of silence to offer a credible past of schools A number of students of educational history are of the opinion that educational historiography would benefit from the use of new methodological approaches, even if they were mere adaptations at first (Escolano, 2007; Pap K., 2007). In this context, viewed from Agustin Escolano’s “horizon of expectation” (Koselleck, 2003), my research can be considered an original product, pioneering work.
In sum, it seems that in the wake of the crisis of modernity, with the end of the unconditional trust in the positivist worldview, and as a result of the epistemological debate, educational historiography, like other fields of study, has come to have the opportunity to redefine and reconstruct itself (Stone and Hobsbawn, 1980, quoted in Escolano, 2007).
Ignác Romsics (2002, 2010) finds that the interdisciplinary approach has resulted in a number of excellent works, which would have been impossible with the traditional instruments of (educational) historiography. While such an approach has not gained general currency, it has been responsible for a shift in attitudes, a notion that large syntheses are unprovable speculations, and hence unnecessary (Romsics, 2010).
The facts and theoretical principles cited make the process of research more interesting and exciting, enhance the value of the rich empirical material I have access to, and validate those
new methodological endeavours that seek to give verified nuances to the images of a given historical period with the help of microhistories.
As a psychologist and researcher, I am most interested in how individuals construct the reality of their past, present, and what is based on their horizon of expectation (Koselleck, 2003), the future. I have discovered surprising, and at the same time fascinating, similarities between the psychological approach to the subject of memory, and the post-structuralist approach of modern educational historiography (e.g. Gyáni, 2007; Escolano, 2007).
As globalization intensifies, the different cultures establish more and more intensive contacts, become mutually dependant. As a result, there is now new research into the theoretical proposition according to which the influences of a given culture essentially determine intrapsychic processes (Nguuyen Luu és Fülöp, 2006). Thanks to new findings and concepts about childhood, a new, interdisciplinary breed of childhood studies has emerged, which looks at the child and childhood as essentially social and cultural constructs (Golnhofer és Szabolcs, 2005).
It thus makes a compelling field of study to identify the ways in which a given period in history and society influenced subjective representation, intrapsychic processes, such as the subjective evaluation of primary school years. Hungarian specialist literature related to the historical approach to childhood has begun to consider childhood as something dependant on culture rather than a universal phenomenon, even in a historical perspective (Szabolcs, 2003).
Instead of a general notion of the child applicable to all children, different historical ages and social groups are considered to construct their own concepts of childhood, giving rise to particular, specific forms of socialisation and development in childhood. Studying the history of the notion of childhood has more and more bearing on understanding the current sense of childhood, because the historical approaches to childhood(s) dovetail with the current inquiries of pedagogy (Szabolcs, 2009). I am convinced that to understand and interpret childhood, including the primary school years, education studies and psychology must embrace research that uses new methods, giving inspiration for the identification of fields of research of current relevance and for the articulation of specific tasks for education (Golnhofer and Szabolcs, 2005).
Research objectives
The dissertation seeks to explore, present and interpret the individual representation, or subjective evaluation, of a social phenomenon, i.e. going to primary school in the 1950s, through the content analysis of narrative interviews.
The research also seeks to facilitate an understanding of the meaning systems of the childhood constructed in Hungary in the 1950s as presented through content analysis; to describe primary school pupils’ day-to-day life, educational development and systems of lifeworlds at school; and to make, by the agency of the research process, the child as a pupil the subject of a historical discourse (Szabolcs, 2011).
I want to reveal the extensive and comprehensive symbolic systems that are embedded in the lifeworld of the primary school of the 1950s; the ways in which experience was gathered; the rules of behaviour at school; the rites, significances and values (Gyáni, 2010) that are attached to the school and the person of the teacher. Further, I aim to expose how the pupils of the 1950s perceived and absorbed social constraints and stimuli – the influence of state power – in the form of anxieties, interests and typical behaviours, and what meaning and significance is attributed to all this by the adults who look back.
The research sample
The research sample was provided by the typescripts of 81 narrative interviews which the students of the Faculty of Primary School and Kindergarten Teacher Training at ELTE conducted with their grandparents about their experiences during, and memories of, their primary school years. The analytical units (Babbie, 1996; Sánta, 2006) were the final term papers of the 2008/2009 spring term and the 2009/2010 autumn term, out of which I randomly selected 81 recollections of the 1950s, whose subjects started primary school any time between 1940 and 1956.
Processing method
I employed a quantitative, non-intrusive (Babbie, 1996; Falus, 1996) research method. I used content analysis to process the available empirical material.
I carried out a narrative analysis, during which I subjected to further content analysis one of the structural units of the narrative that are defined by sequence types, the narrative evaluation. The analysis is not to be considered a narrative psychological content analysis because I did not attach psychological meanings to the revealed linguistic patterns. In analysing the narrative evaluation (László, 2005; Szokolszky, 2004) that appears in the texts, the “message from the past,” I used Labov and Waletzky’s model (1967). Within the evaluative–ideological plane of the narrators’ perspective, I tried to identify their personal attitude vis-à-vis the events, their beliefs, characteristic world view, key values, the way they interpret the world they represent, their primary school years in the 1950s.
Results
The dissertation seeks to grasp the various aspects of the problem by approaching it from different angles, through the psychological aspects of the theoretical analysis of individual memory, identity and narrativity (e.g. Baddeley, 2001; Király, 2002; Pataki, 2003; Erős, 2006), and by using postmodern and post-structuralist approaches in educational historiography (e.g. White, 1977; Gyáni, 2003; Bíró-Pap K., 2007; Escolano 2007). The diverse theoretical approaches I adapt from different fields of learning display surprising and essential analogies, reinforcing the interdisciplinary nature of my work.
This unusual, unconventional, multidisciplinary, integrative field of research offered a new perspective and the appropriate conceptual and methodological instruments for the analysis of human relations and attitudes, as well as of social processes. It follows from the interdisciplinary nature of my work that the individual and society, Hungary in the 1950s and the subjective views of those who were school pupils then, appear together and simultaneously, in their relationship to one another. While narrating the stories of their school years, the interviewees kept referring to the broader social and historical contexts. The individual representation and subjective evaluation of the experiences of their school years was closely related to events in the history of Hungary, providing an empirical proof of the theoretical thesis according to which the operation of the individual psyche, as regards both its genesis and current mode of activity, is always embedded in a collective or social context (Pataki, 2011).
These facts corroborate a result of the research, viz. that in addition to the concept of the construct, psychology and educational historiography share further important points of contact. The concepts and doctrines of social psychology do not emerge in a vacuum (Erős, 2006): they are greatly influenced by history and its changes, the cultural, political and social contexts available at a given point in space and time. Ferenc Erős (2006) even claims
psychology and social psychology are themselves histories. The task acted as a catalyst on those micro-environmental processes through which historical and social knowledge is transmitted, enabling a reinterpretation of the relationship of generations by representing the school and the primary school years of the past. Pataki (2003) notes that there is today an express demand for the systematic study of the modes of social and cultural transmission. If only to a modest degree, works of this kind may satisfy such a demand.
The ultimate question of my study, as probably of all studies whose focus is man, is “How to live?” How to live as a teacher, a parent, a pupil, a researcher? How can one preserve professional, educational and human values while living in, and “appropriately” adapting to, continuously changing historical, social, cultural and personal contexts? To be more precise, how should one continuously deconstruct and reconstruct, relativize and reinterpret, the above in historical time? The interrogated texts offer a number of answers, both specific and suitable for generalization, to these exciting problems, including the schizophrenia of double education (Mikonya, 2006; Donáth, 2008), which marked particularly the period under scrutiny, and which also emerges from the interviews.
My dissertation provides empirical evidence that the shared experiences of groups with identical or similar origins and functions result in a similar set of narratives and mentalities (Pataki, 2003). If we can access a part of this set of narratives, we will also have access to the most popular topics of the collective memory they hold (Assmann, 1999). This in turn allows us to trace the processes of the collective creation of values and transmission of significances that take place in similar social, historical and social psychological situations.
It is important to see how the microhistories add detail and nuance to our historical knowledge of the 1950s, the longue durée. Thanks to the diversity of perspectives, the microhistories provide a large number of views of the same object, each from a different observation point;
so many colourful, pointillistic images reflected in the subjective experiences. This is a vast repository of knowledge, because in addition to the specific memories and experiences, the afterlife of a subject, the past spanning between the 1950s and the time of the interview, also influences the emerging image. The other way (method) through which microhistories transmit historical knowledge has to do with their affecting the entirety of human perception, their providing a comprehensive stimulus for all fields of perception. Like a historical novel, but even more concretely, they add a third dimension to two-dimensional knowledge: they evoke sounds, tastes, smells, feelings, bodily perception, proprioceptive stimuli and intensive images, encouraging the functioning of imagination, attention, memory, as well as of learning.
This is the added value of microhistories: they make our knowledge of macrohistory more profound and personal. By presenting, condensing and passing on appropriately processed microhistories, we reinterpret and modernize an ancient mode of knowledge transmission.
The plurality of perspectives and three-dimensional perception make possible a time-travel that only narratives and stories can instigate—narratives that are equally in touch with identity construction, remembering, and the time and situation of their birth.
Representing and categorizing individual experiences was an important part of my research.
While I respected the individuality of these contents, the recollections allowed me to distil general data and facts about the culture, society and educational praxis of the 1950s.
I identified the following topics: the objective and spatial structure of learning in the 1950s;
the school as the scene of collective experiences; remembering the person of the teacher; the day-to-day life of primary school pupils in the 1950s; the summary of the narrator’s memory
of their primary school days from a present perspective – the messages from the past, historical events through the eyes of pupils.
For a content analysis of the objective and spatial structure of learning, a wealth of material was provided by accurate descriptions of the building and environment of the school, accounts of the history of the building, and recollections of the furnishing of the classroom.
The objective structure of the school in the 1950s included scanty school equipment, one or two books, usually no school bag. The objects were attached to memories and stories of concrete experiences; during the content analysis, the descriptions of the objects and buildings provided, as it were, background information to the stories about human relations, feelings and actions, also lending a vivid colour to the image of the historical period and the given point in time.
The ideal of education in the 1950s was community education, considered an important instrument in the shaping of new man. The school is often described in the recollections as the eventful scene of collective experiences. The specific memories that the interviewees recount attest to the key role that the class community, the classmates and the friends played, and include references to the relationship of boys and girls, the function of the recently launched pioneer movement as a catalyst of the community, the way the value system of the period influenced the community, and paradoxically, to independence as something of value for the community.
The interviewees have very distinct memories of their teachers. The emotional colouring of these memories is nuanced; in the interpretation of the adult, the negative memories related to the teacher often become acceptable, even important instruments of education. The interviewees tend to emphasize the life-long influence of their teacher’s personality, their work with them. The teaching methods of the teachers had solid foundations, were beyond doubt, and the persons enjoyed general esteem and respect. Their methods of education and discipline were fundamentally different from those customary today, providing the teachers with firm guidelines that helped them to minimize the occurrence of unpredictable situations during their educational work.
The praxis of the 1950s was marked by a focus on teaching, as opposed to today’s learning- based theory and praxis. However, these approaches are not mutually exclusive, and we may well draw on those former teaching methods and conducts whose long-term positive effects have by now become obvious.
There was no sharp line between the respective worlds of children and adults. The children knew a great deal about their parents’ political views or the family’s financial situation.
Adults did not protect the children’s world from the hardships of adult life, and considered it natural to prepare their offspring for the life to come with practical tasks: after school, every child was obliged to perform chores around the house before getting down to doing their homework. The line between the respective subsystems of parents and children were often blurred.
It was only gradually that the school became the primary source for the children’s knowledge about the world. For children living in villages or on farms, the school became a major transmitter of knowledge and values even more slowly, with more qualifications. The notion of a child as someone who would perform housework or tasks around the house, and could be relied upon to provide a hand in the cooperative in the summer, was slowly replaced by the image of the child who would perform school-related tasks even when at home. “Schooling”
the families, shaping their concept of the child, was a key element of the construction process.
They had to come to terms with the institution of homework, performed first alongside, and
then instead of, housework, as well as with the fact that the school or the teacher may interfere with the life of the family, the relationship of parents and children, in a variety of ways.
Examples include sanctioning at home unacceptable behaviour in the school or vice versa (e.g. failing to salute the teacher on the street, or failing to be home by 8 pm), parents contributing work to the school, giving a hand in reconstructing the building, etc.
In these accounts, childhood is barely acknowledged to have an intrinsic value, and the intensive experience of its joys first surfaces in the middle of the 1950s, as in memories of the pioneer movement. The primary school years emerge in these interviews as a diligent, and usually not entirely carefree, period of preparation for adulthood. Play usually involved no instruments, no toys. On the other hand, interviewees recall playing all the time: while working, in bomb craters, on the way to school. Playing in class was punished. Their games usually involved full-body motion in an outdoor environment, and were based on their own activities and imagination.
The notion advanced in society through the currency of primary education that a child at school had value for both the society and the economy (i.e. increased productivity) became a part of the construct of the child of primary school age always in an individual manner, filtered through the personality of a given child and the values of their family—if it became a part at all. There were always current political and social reasons for this. The school experiences of children of the appropriate age were essentially determined by the Second World War, the related experiences. From a present perspective, school did not seem to be very important, events simply happened.
The models of childhoods always contain simplifications and partialities. Schank admits a liking for the idea that “no generalization is worth a damn, including this one.” It is, he says, a succinct summary of his own investigations: “we understand the world through our various attempts to make and abandon generalizations” (Schank, 2004). For the same reason, discussing simplified models, applying new criteria to the reconsideration of the nature of the child aged 6 to 12, allows us to perform an empirical data-based questioning of concepts of the child that border on stereotypes. By thinking about the child, we can shape and develop our own pedagogical concept of the child. Performing a reinterpretation of the relationship between the teacher and the pupils, between the school and the students, from the perspective of the teacher’s profession, exposing the diversity of these relations, may lead to a better understanding and rethinking of individual philosophies of, and approaches to, education, our own pedagogical practices (Kluge, 2003).
My empirical material adds a myriad new mosaics, interpretations and data to the nuanced image of the primary school pupils constructed in Hungary in the 1950s. Over and above this dimension of educational history, I hope to have shown how important it is to complete (replace?) the generally accepted, normative regard for the differences between the age- related aspects of the children, and the resultant teaching praxis, with a readiness to note, and make pedagogical considerations for, individual differences within the same age group. A child’s individuality deserves support because throughout their socially constructed childhoods, the children who sit in the classrooms are individuals. A further notable postmodern consequence of my study vis-à-vis the praxis of education is the acceptance of the possibility that many different ways of life may coexist, a tolerance and teacherly patience towards otherness and individuality. Plurality in this sense foregrounds a subjective approach, imagination, individual absorption, and such forms of (artistic) self-expression and reception that open the way towards diverse subjectivities (Németh, 2004).
A possible frame of interpretation for the postmodern age, which is the historical period that forms the broader lifeworld of schools today, and which I approached in my dissertation from a variety of angles, from different fields of knowledge, is that it coordinates the new forms of social and mental practices. The most crucial result of the postmodern approach is the desire to perform the reinterpretation described above. I think it is partly the inspiration for the reinterpretation and reinvention of historiography, and subsequently of educational historiography, as well as the strong encouragement to reinterpret childhood(s) and the school in the postmodern space, that can be defined as the postmodern reality.
As a part of it, we must create a new school, which resists the dominance of power, avoids simplifications, which is defined by new, adaptive approaches, forms of conduct, paradigms, structures and values, and which can always be reconsidered and redeveloped. Looking back at the past from the perspective of the present thus helps us to outline the school of the future more precisely—the school that can cope with the almost endless diversity and plurality of a postmodern world (Hankiss, 2005; cf. Mészáros, 2004).
This attitude is what comprises one of the new features of my study. I present the world of children who were aged 6 to 12 in the 1950s, reinterpreting the relationship between adult and child; I consider it in a continuously changing world, along cultural and social characteristics, recognizing its own value and subjectivity. Historical in focus, this study considers children as social actors, and looks at the actual, day-to-day life of persons who went to primary school in the Hungary of the 1950s.
While fitting in a range of research that employs qualitative methods, and being dominantly interpretative in nature, the choice of subject, being a primary school pupil in the 1950s, makes my study an original product. Unlike other historical investigations of the 1950s, my examination of microhistories prioritized particularity, orality, the individuality of life stories and lifestyles, the plurality and diversity of the latter. The subject, which required a novel, or at least non-general, sensitivity on the part of the researcher, together with the written documentation whose difficulty, and perhaps even more so its value, lies in its resistance to generalization, may provide inspiration for new, even bolder qualitative research in education science, studies that undertake to employ further perspectives.
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