Hungarian teachers demand education-system overhaul

A crowd of several thousand teachers and supporters braved the pouring rain and gathered in front of Parliament on Saturday to demand an education-system overhaul.

The teachers and their organizations are demanding a complete shake-up in the education system designed by the current administration.

They are demanding the return of the school-leaving age to 18, radical cuts in mandatory curricula and in classroom hours, restoration of the rights of school management to handle their own budgets and do their own hiring and firing, and a reduction in administrative tasks to give the teachers more time to teach.

Some 737 schools initiated the protest and more joined in to demand a completely new education law.

They argue that the current system is over-centralized and want to give schools and teachers more initiative.

Representatives of the health care, welfare, culture, and public administration sectors joined the demonstration in support of the teachers.

Piroska Gallo, head of the Teachers' Trade Union, Hungary's largest teachers' union with 40,000 members, marched at the head of the crowd.

The current system, she said, was bad for children, teachers, parents, and "bad for the entire country!" She likened the current system to "a dead horse," and told the government to stop trying to ride it.

An opinion poll reported on Saturday found that three-quarters of the public, including two-thirds of government supporters, agreed with the teachers' demands.

Laszlo Mendrey of the Democratic Teachers' Union, the second-largest teachers' union with 22,000 members, voiced his union's full support of the teachers' demands.

Meanwhile, Laszlo Palkovics, State Secretary for Education, acknowledged that the government was ready to investigate a significant part of the problems raised, which is why they organized a "roundtable."

"Whether one chooses to sit down and negotiate or to demonstrate instead is a matter of taste," he said. He also objected to taking politics into the schools.

He spoke of the roundtable organized earlier in the week, adding that there were no taboo topics. He said that the roundtable talks would continue with all invited participants. The next meeting, he said, would be in two weeks and experts from the OECD education policy committee had been invited.

The demonstrating teachers had charged that the roundtable had been superficial and had avoided the essence of their concerns. Endit