Learning on the Periphery: The Spatial and Social Dimensions of Farmstead Schools through the Example of the Southern Heves Region

Abstract

It is well known that farmsteads were an important component of the Hungarian settlement structure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emerging primarily in the Alföld region (the Great Hungarian Plain). The increasingly widespread expansion of sparsely populated outlying areas also generated a demand for schooling for the children of the agrarian population living on these prairies. Although the issue was already discussed at the Diet of 1790, the first statutory regulation was enacted only in 1868: section 47 of the Public Education Act stipulated the obligation to educate children living in outlying areas. The farmstead schools that were subsequently established gradually became distinctive institutions within the Hungarian school system, reaching their heyday in the interwar period. Their significance is further demonstrated by the adoption of a separate piece of legislation to govern farmstead schooling, namely Act VII of 1926. After the Second World War, however, changes in lifestyle and occupational structure, technological development, and the modernization of education increasingly rendered farmstead schools obsolete. As a result, their number first declined gradually, then sharply, and by the 1980s they had largely ceased to exist. 

The Southern Heves region provides a particularly suitable field for presenting the evolutionary process of farmstead schools, as it geographically belonged to the Alföld. Consequently, within the county, this area recorded the highest proportion of agrarian population and outlying settlements. The research is based on sources from state and ecclesiastical archives, enabling an exploration of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of these schools, an insight into the internal world of small, ungraded schools and an examination of the reasons for and processes of their closure. The surviving student registers also make it possible to analyse the interrelationships between school infrastructure, spatial location and the effectiveness of learning.