Hungary’s K-12 education is increasingly less capable of performing its basic function: it does not prepare Hungarians for active involvement in either societal life or the labour market, nor does it reduce the existing gaps in opportunities. In the following decades, the role of convertible skills, individual flexibility and the ability to continue learning – in other words the very skills and abilities that the Hungarian K-12 education is most spectacularly incapable of imparting – will become more important than ever before.
For small, resource-poor countries, the development of human resources is the key to improving their competitiveness. Of all the conceivable investments today, high quality K-12 education is most likely to yield high returns.
The efforts to address the sprawling set of problems that plague the Hungarian education system must begin with remedying the following five key issues:
- Lack of a future vision (we need to clarify what we expect from K-12 education, what type of citizens we want to raise and how we want to educate them);
- Lack of performance (in addition to giving teachers professional autonomy, we must also provide for a general high-quality of education);
- Lack of teachers (we need to identify solutions which help ensure that a sufficiently high number of highly-trained and motivated teachers will be available over the next decades to realise these goals);
- Lack of efficiency in K-12 education (we must create a well-working and cost-efficient institutional system);
- Lack of autonomy (we must give our schools and our trained teachers the space to do the work that they know best)
You can view the full report of policy proposals in the following link:
https://egyensulyintezet.hu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ei_proposal_education.pdf
