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A PIONEER OF MODERN PEDAGOGY IN HUNGARY: SÁNDOR KARÁCSONY (1891—1952)
to. Just the opposite: it is only in a real-life, family context where roles become
clear and in normal family interaction rules can be agreed upon. Without going
into too much detail, if teachers and pupils are able to accept each other as older
and younger members of the same family, then there is no doubt that love is
present in the relationship. The certainty of love and trust is the foundation of
a relationship in which conflicts do not become fatal, intervention in another
person’s life does not lead to fatal results, and the partners are able to tolerate
intervention into their lives.
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Karacsony undertook an in-depth study of the process of education, compris¬
ing its legal, aesthetic, linguistic, social and religious aspects, for each stage of
the pupils’ development. Unfortunately, there is no scope for presenting this
in detail, so we shall just provide a few examples.
In one of his best-known studies, called Magyar nevelés’® (“Hungarian Educa¬
tion”), he gives a detailed account of the typical features of the different stages
of child development, highlighting the fact that individuals experience the
changes of transition across the whole range of their psychological functions,
but with the focus on different components at each stage.
As for young children, his most important finding was that their whole psy¬
chic life is oriented towards emotions (play), and they “understand” through
emotions. At the “growing child stage”, the first years of school life (Karacsony
sometimes calls this the “kid stage”), the child’s growing intellectual awareness
is manifested in the passion for collection. Collecting, the mechanical opera¬
tion of the intellect, represents a transition to future conscious intellectual
life. (For this reason this developmental stage is very suitable for acquiring
large amounts of lexical knowledge, for rote learning, “memoriter”, which will
subsequently form latent elements of a person’s culture. Therefore it is a severe
mistake to cut back on this type of learning at this stage or to ban it by law, as
some modern educational systems recommend.)
Adolescence, contrary to popular belief, has its focus on intellectual mat¬
ters. It is at this stage where a developing psyche will first try to discover the
connections between the different facts of life, to understand the underlying
rules, and to seek answers to the whys and wherefores of life. A consequence
of this, from the point of view of learning, is that students are not happy any
55 KarAcsony, A magyarok kincse, 256-276.
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