Parents' association warns of "terror" in Hungarian schools

Emotional "terror" in Hungarian schools is an everyday phenomenon with teachers regularly mistreating students, according to an expert with the National Association of Hungarian Parents (MSZOE).

Ágnes Toldi Simonné of the MSZOE told daily Népszabadság that despite her organization's repeated urging, the Education Ministry has declined to develop plans to regularly test the psychological readiness of teachers for classroom work. She said the association receives complaints continuously. One of the most shocking stories involved a teacher calling their students "remains of an abortion."

A single mother of three living under difficult financial circumstances said that her youngest son suffered so much humiliation in a school of a small Nógrád County town that he needed to be enrolled in a Budapest boarding school. After the head teacher of his class (osztályfőnök) in his old school had discriminated against him, other students started picking on him. Then another teacher told him: "When you think about it, they have a reason to be picking on you." He lost interest in studying and failed four subjects in seventh grade. In his new class, he was stigmatized as the failed student, and his teachers often told him when he could not answer a question: "Sit down, son, you are stupid anyway."

Another woman said that it only made things worse when she complained about her son's teacher. She said that parents should know that if they express their disagreement with a teacher's methods, they can expect that their children will always be picked on by that teacher. This woman once complained that money collected for photocopying was not accounted for and said she would not be paying that much in the future. After that, her son's teacher said before every test: "You will have to write down every question by hand, because your classmate is too cheap to pay for photocopying."

Simonné said that cases involving the undue humiliation of children are hard to prove, because often neither the student nor parents dare to make a complaint.

According to current law, school directors are charged with developing programs to prevent cases of emotional abuse of students. They can warn teachers or fire them on the grounds of "unsuitability" for the job, but the latter happens only very rarely.

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