Schools in the role of the family – Kolping pedagogy in Hungary

Abstract The success of church-based schools is proved by the students' results and with the low rate of dropout according to previous researches. Nevertheless, there are neither international, nor Hungarian studies about Kolping pedagogy and its pioneer character that makes it a special actor among the faith-based schools, which aim to reduce the rate of student drop-out. In our study, we search for the specific characters of Kolping pedagogy in the schools' institutional documents. We investigated eight Hungarian secondary grammar and vocational schools' house rules, operational and organisational regulations, and pedagogical programmes ( N = 8/8/8) with one method of content analysis which is document analysis. In the documents Adolf Kolping's community-building philosophy can be found according to the four pillars that have their roots in the history of the 19th century. The schools' general pedagogical principles want to solve modern social phenomena, and create chances for low SES students. Our results show that – even if with different methods (fitting to the institutions' individual characters) – but every document includes the Kolping characters with different aims and tasks. These are fulfilled by several pedagogical methods, first of all by community building. Just like in case of every type of church-based schools, intragenerational community networks are important chances for generating social and cultural capital.