Settling for a “good enough” school: contradictions of middle class reproduction in a small town in illiberal Hungary

Abstract The politics of the Orbán regime, in power in Hungary since 2010, are reshaping the possibilities for middle class reproduction and social mobility, as revealed through our analysis of parental dilemmas around school choice and future aspirations in a peripheral small town. As the main targets of re-industrialization and an important voter base for the regime, small towns are particularly relevant localities for studying the transformations of middle-class reproduction. Globally, anxieties over class reproduction pushes parents to invest more intensely in their children’s education, whereas increasingly worrying about the detrimental effects of related pressures on their child’s well-being. In small towns in the global semi-periphery, parental dilemmas around schooling appear in a particularly acute form due to the limited possibilities for social advancement, the high financial and emotional costs that mobility requires, and the racialised dimension of localised class relations. We contend that policies of the Orbán regime, such as the ‘churchification’ of education and the privileging of technical middle schools, have further reshaped local possibilities and routes of advancement. The tension between the pervasive promise of middle-class advancement through education and the locally rooted assessment of realistic employment possibilities exposes the contradictions of the current regime and helps to grasp the localised consequences of its socio-economic re-engineering. As in the studied context class is strongly racialised, we examine the strategies and dilemmas of middle class parents of the ethnic majority, and Roma parents who aspire to become middle class in a relational way, revealing how ethnicity further complicates middle class reproduction in Hungarian peripheral small towns.