Hungary Defends 'ideological' School Syllabus

Budapest, Feb 3 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Feb, 2020 ) :Hungary defended a new national school curriculum on Monday after teachers' groups labelled it "ideological" and one association warned it would "poison public thinking".

The Hungarian Teachers Association called for the curriculum -- which includes some anti-Semitic writers -- to be withdrawn immediately.

Revamped compulsory reading lists include novelists like Jozsef Nyiro, who supported Hungary's pro-Nazi regime in 1944, but leave out the country's only Nobel literature prize-winner Imre Kertesz -- a Holocaust survivor.

"The next generation needs a curriculum of European Hungarian values," said Miklos Kasler, minister in charge of education.

The history material puts more emphasis on post-World War II deportations of Hungarians to gulags in the Soviet Union than on the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Nazi death camps during the war.

In the civic studies section, the term "critical thinking" from previous versions has also been replaced by "self-reflective" thinking.

The new national curriculum, which must be followed in certain school years from September, was unveiled on Friday but has since been blasted by education professionals.

The head of the Association of Hungarian History Teachers called it "one-sided and ideological".

"Since the system-change (from communism in 1990) no national curriculum has contained compulsory ideology to such a degree," Laszlo Miklosi told the HVG website.

One former teacher wrote on the news site Azonnali.hu that the curriculum was a "nuclear bomb in the rightwing's culture war" led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

In recent years, Orban allies in charge of theatres, museums, and other cultural institutions have favoured works by patriotic writers and artists.