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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 accordingly.’° 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 +
