The institutional conditions of adapting to future challenges in the Hungarian education system

This country study on Hungary is a contribution to the “Future Challenges to Education in Central-Eastern European Context” project of the Central European University – Democracy Institute. The study is a contribution to the comparative analysis of the adaptability of education systems that is created by the interplay of the capacity of schools to change, and of educational governance to incite and support school-level change. It also provides input to the contextualization of the impact of various future challenges on education systems. The study argues that there are three groups of problems that deserve special attention in the Hungarian context: the modernization challenge of enabling schools to foster the development of those transversal skills that strengthen the individual adaptability of pupils, overcoming the extremely negative effect of autocratic politics on the work of schools and on educational governance, and enabling education to mitigate inequalities mainly through the effective reduction of social selection in education. The main conclusion of the analysis of the study is that the complete systemic reorganization of the Hungarian primary and secondary education system after 2010 eliminated the institutional conditions of adaptation both at the level of schools, as well as at the level of governance.