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MIKLÓS HELTAI — PÁL HELTAI
THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATION
Karácsony wanted to solve a practical problem: his problem was that he found
school education ineffective. He observed that in spite of the noblest intentions
and a variety of excellent didactic tools coupled with “educative material” of the
highest order, the “results” were not proportionate with the effort.
Why should this be so? Karácsony identified two fundamental problems: a
linguistic and a psychological one, the problem of language and the problem
of intervention.
THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE
As a secondary school teacher Karácsony noticed that there was a huge gap
between the language that students use at home and the language that they are
expected to use at school." Textbook language, and the language of education
in general, poses problems all over the world, especially in the early years of
schooling, but also at later stages of the pupils" school career (cf. Bernsteins
theory, and the literature on educational linguistics)." Karácsony first came
up against this linguistic problem as a secondary school teacher, and realized
that the problem was even more severe in Hungary, aggravated by the fact that
school (textbook) language, just like the standard language used in many other
areas of life, was a kind of literal translation from other languages, and was
very different from the language used by the pupils at home.
He proposed that textbook language — indeed, the language of science in
general — should be reformed to bring it closer to the language spoken by the
pupils at home.’ More importantly, he suggested that teachers — instead of
holding dialectal and vernacular forms of language in contempt — should learn
to speak the pupils’ dialect and should adapt their teaching materials accord¬
ingly.’° He also noted that schoolchildren hated grammatical parsing, and that
the teaching of grammar was anything but linguistic education.
KarAcsony, Sandor, A magyar észjdrds, Budapest, Széphalom, 2009, 120-121.
8 BERNSTEIN, Basil, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1, London — Boston, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1971.
KARÁCSONY, A magyar demokrácia, 36.
5 KARÁCSONY, Sándor, A magyarok kincse, Budapest, Széphalom, 2008, 272.
* 240 +