How do we become a smart nation?

Our K-12 education is increasingly less capable of performing its basic function: it does not prepare Hungarians for active involvement in either, societal life or the labour market, nor does it reduce the existing gaps in opportunities. In the following decades, the role of convertible skills, individual flexibility and the ability to continue learning – in other words the very skills and abilities that the Hungarian K-12 education is most spectacularly incapable of imparting – will become more important than ever before.

For small, resource-poor countries, the development of human resources is the key to improving their competitiveness. Of all the conceivable investments today, high quality K-12 education is most likely to yield high returns.

The efforts to address the sprawling set of problems that plague the Hungarian education system  must begin with remedying the following five key issues:

1. lack of a future vision (we need to clarify what we expect from K-12 education, what type of citizens we want to raise and how we want to educate them);
2. lack of performance (in addition to giving teachers professional autonomy, we must also provide for a general high-quality of education);
3. shortage of teachers (we need to identify solutions which help ensure that a sufficiently high number of highly-trained and motivated teachers will be available over the next decades to realise these goals);
4. inefficiencies (we must create a well-working and costefficient institutional system);
5. lack of autonomy (we must give our schools and our trained teachers the space to do the work that they know best).

One of the most pressing problems in Hungary today is the need to ensure that there will be a steady supply of teaching professionals: We need more young teachers to be attracted to this profession, and we especially need to steer the most talented youths towards teaching. The training of teachers needs to become more effective in tying together research and applied teaching, and the excessively disciplinarian, rote learning centred educational approach needs to be updated in terms of both, the general attitude towards education as well as the educational methods deployed.

You can view the additional policy proposals at the following link:

https://staging.egyensulyintezet.hu/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ei_oktatas_javaslat_ENG_v7.pdf