In October, protesters linked hands from the Elizabeth Bridge to Keleti train station, a mile-and-a-half human chain that stretched through the heart of downtown Budapest. Bus passengers gawked while commuters honked in solidarity from passing cars. Schools canceled morning classes as students and teachers walked out to protest meager teacher salaries. Sporadic strikes and demonstrations would follow into the cold winter months. With rising inflation, spiking gas prices, and intermittent shortages on supermarket shelves, the teacher protests are only the most visible sign of Hungary’s economic distress.
Despite Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s reputation in the Western press, no protesters were hauled off in unmarked vans to secret detention centers. Freewheeling, cosmopolitan Budapest has always resented Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling conservative party, and its combative prime minister. From marches against a controversial overtime law in 2019 to protests against a Chinese university’s proposed downtown campus in 2021 to this year’s spate of teacher and student walkouts, Budapest has long been restive under Orban.
Unlike so many other protests, the teacher strikes actually seem to have gotten somewhere. Until recently, the European Union and Orban were locked in a staredown over billions in subsidies, with Brussels insisting on more stringent anti-corruption measures before the monies would be released. Now that a tentative deal is in place, the Hungarian government has announced a series of pay raises for public school teachers over the next three years. This modest carrot was paired with a big stick. In early December, the Ministry of the Interior fired eight public school teachers in Budapest for striking.
The strikes, the firings, and their political aftermath offer a revealing look at Hungarian governance, which has recently been touted by some as a model for Republicans. After years of lamenting the Left’s stranglehold on education, conservatives have lately begun to challenge liberal hegemony in public schools and universities. From contentious local elections over COVID-era school closures and social justice activism in the classroom to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to reshape his state’s universities, conservatives are suddenly interested in appropriating the levers of power in education. It remains unclear, however, if the Hungarian model can be exported to the United States. The policy choices available to a small, homogeneous Eastern European nation of under 10 million are quite different from those on offer in a sprawling, decentralized country of over 300 million (with over 50 million students in K-12 public schools alone).
The firing of the eight teachers demonstrates the reach of Hungary’s national government, which controls everything from influential state-run media outlets to public school curricula to the country’s best universities. It was also an emotionally charged moment for teachers, students, and parents — Hungary’s elite public gimnáziums, or high schools, have a special place in the national consciousness.
In the U.S., getting into a selective university is the goal of most ambitious young people. In Hungary, winning a coveted slot at an elite public high school is the moment of maximum pressure. Students are chosen through a grueling, hourslong examination process, and classes are notoriously tough. Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi supposedly received a “C” in high school physics.
Many of the best Budapest gimnáziums date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a result of mass literacy, the revival of the Hungarian language, and economic growth concentrated in the bustling capital city. According to the Hungarian American historian John Lukacs, the quality of instructors at a top Budapest gimnázium circa 1900 was roughly comparable to senior professors at today’s American universities. Despite their modest salaries, teachers at the best Hungarian schools are still held in high regard.
Six of the fired school teachers taught at Karinthy Frigyes, the first high school in Eastern Europe to be accredited by the International Baccalaureate committee. Another was fired from Eotvos Jozsef, a top public school in downtown Budapest where students walked out to protest the dismissals.
The sense of institutional history is palpable at a school like Eotvos Jozsef. In a small alcove on the first floor, a statue commemorates alumni who died in combat during World War I. Jozsef Antall, Hungary’s first democratically elected prime minister, taught at Eotvos until he was fired for anti-Soviet political activism.
“Public” is the key adjective in the preceding paragraphs. Even today, there are relatively few private alternatives for Hungarian students. International schools cater to foreigners and Hungarian families wealthy enough to afford tuition. Parochial, religious, and other putatively private schools receive considerable state funding (and oversight). The Ministry of the Interior exercises a degree of control over curricula and personnel that would astonish most Americans, accustomed as we are to local school board elections, county ordinances, and a host of private, religious, and nontraditional alternatives to public schools.
Hungarian higher education is also dominated by the public sector. From the humble főiskola, roughly equivalent to an American community college, to Budapest’s best universities, almost all Hungarian institutions of higher learning are public and therefore subject to direct governmental supervision.
In the summer of 2020, Budapest was rocked by another protest, this time over Orban’s appointment of conservatives to the board of Színház és Filmművészeti Egyetem (SZFE), the national university of the performing arts. The university’s new director has been frank about his desire to change the school’s ideological climate, having recently said that students need “retuning.” The fight was so impassioned because for Hungarians interested in studying film, theater, or the performing arts, SZFE is just about the only game in town.
The U.S. is no stranger to public school controversies, clashes over higher education, or teacher strikes, but compared to its counterparts in the Hungarian government, the Department of Education has limited sway. This is not to say that federal policy doesn’t matter. The spigot of money channeled by Washington and federal legislation such as No Child Left Behind matters a great deal. But from personnel to policy, the Hungarian national government has much more say over day-to-day operations in public schools and universities.
This influence manifests itself in different ways, from granular changes in the history curriculum to deciding which books make high school reading lists. The case of the fired public school teachers in Budapest is another example of the national government’s reach. It is almost impossible to imagine the Department of Education directing a similar purge in Seattle or Boston.
The autonomy of state public school systems was put to the test during the coronavirus pandemic, when then-President Donald Trump and then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos repeatedly urged schools to reopen. The intransigence of deep blue districts, which insisted on remote learning, mandatory masking, and other stringent anti-COVID-19 measures long after red states and European countries resumed normal lessons, is a reminder of the limits of federal power over public schools.
The same can be said of American higher education, a field dominated by private institutions and state-run systems that jealously guard their autonomy. In Florida, appointing a conservative president to the state’s flagship public university was enough to provoke a minor controversy. A hypothetical DeSantis presidential administration would surely enjoy prodding liberal arts colleges with rhetorical attacks and lawsuits aimed at ending racial quotas, but Harvard will never let a conservative president dictate personnel. Meanwhile, public university systems are run by the states and largely insulated from federal interference by layers of local government.
There are many reasons for Hungary’s centralized education system. A small Eastern European nation with one major city is naturally more amenable to top-down decision-making than a sprawling country that encompasses schools from Montana to Manhattan. Even before Hungarian communists ruthlessly consolidated political control, their Habsburg predecessors favored a centralized bureaucracy headquartered in Budapest. As Orban’s star has risen, American conservatives have taken note, but the circumstances behind the Hungarian prime minister’s success are unlikely to be replicated in the U.S.
Right-wing gadfly Richard Hanania has touted DeSantis’s direct involvement in Florida school board elections as a model for conservatives looking to reshape public education. Similarly, DeSantis’s announcement this week that Florida will be eliminating all state funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies at state colleges and universities is another example of using public policy to effect change in educational institutions. DeSantis’s success, however, has occurred only at the state level, and more specifically in a red-leaning state where Republicans have been uniquely effective at political organizing since Jeb Bush was governor. And conservative influence in larger, urban school boards such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where DeSantis allies control three of nine seats, is still limited. Meanwhile, it is unclear if Republican governors in purple states can follow the DeSantis playbook, to say nothing of conservatives trying to take over local school boards in California or Massachusetts. To match Orban’s record, Republicans would have to win a wave of state and local elections across the country.
Orban’s political success rests in large part on the system he inherited, which gives the ruling party immense influence over not just public schools and higher education but the media, the arts, and other cultural institutions. In Hungary, the fight for public education is concentrated in Budapest, where key decisions are made in Parliament and at national ministries. In the U.S., the fight is dispersed across thousands of school districts, PTA meetings, and statehouses. Whatever you think of Orban, one thing is clear: The conditions that have enabled his success are unique to Hungary.
Will Collins is a high school teacher in Budapest, Hungary.
