Citizenship education on the other side: The Hungarian case in the Kádár Era (1957–1985)

Our work aims to reconstruct the development of civic/citizenship education (CE) in a non-democratic society and political system. Socialist citizenship seemed to contrast with the common sense of understanding that current papers and EU policies collect under the umbrella term of CE at first sight. We can question this simple statement, which poses the challenge of defining and redefining that concept historically related to the Eastern Bloc and especially to Hungary. The language about socialist citizenship incorporated numerous contradictions, like socialist democracy, which is not a real democracy, pluralist values versus “real” values monopolized and appropriated by an omnipotent ideology, and socialist patriotism in the context of internationalist brotherhood. The paper will focus on the specific vision of the CE in the existing socialism, which was based on the close relationship between the ultimate political ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the education sciences/the profession of pedagogy. This heritage has cast a long shadow on Hungarian education: the roughly missing analysis of the democratic citizenship’s past clearly shows this. This topic is a blind spot in the mainstream discourses 35 years after the regimes changed and Hungary joined European and Western structures again.