Dr Zoltán Pálfy
Panel 3 The Hungarian Minorities
Abstract
This paper focuses on the interwar Romanian state’s efforts to remould the educational system to suit its politically engineered need for national integration. Considering the specificities of the Hungarian ethnic community in Transylvania, I argue that, on the one hand, some of the unexpected yet enduring legacies of nationalizing education were determined by the ethnic aspects of such unifying reforms. On the other hand, the long-term failure to modernize the educational system as such partially stemmed from the ethnic competition that characterised it as re-nationalizing the educational system in Transylvania also meant taking over the structural deficiencies inherent to it. Sheer quantitative expansion, expressed in ratios of enrolment achieved through the depletion of former non-Romanian educational assets, could not, as it was so optimistically assumed in the early days of the change of sovereignty, automatically entail a qualitative boom.
