MRAVNÁ VÝCHOVA V ŠKOLÁCH NA SLOVENSKU A V ZAHRANI ČÍ

ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHICS
(Hungarian pedagogical innovation for teaching Ethics)
István KAMARÁS
Pannon Egyetem Budapest, Hungary,
Antropológia és Etika Tanszék, e-mail: kamarasi@upcmail.hu
Our observations show that in today's Hungary the natural process of passing on social standards has
become distorted, people's relation to values has become unstable in the recent decades. The rising
generation has not been prepared for finding its way independently among the more and more
complicated social conditions.
The 10-to-18-year-olds today know considerably more about the mineral resources of South America
than about feelings and emotions, they know more about free valences than about the determined
nature and the freedom of the human being. They can reduce an equation comparatively well, but they
know little about when man is in good condition. They know something about the health, but barely
any about the wholeness of man; fairly much about being well off, but far less about being well. A 17-
18-year-old-student may even be able to give the chemical formula of ethyl-methyl-keton but knows
almost nothing about the components of personality. In spite of the fact that brave and promising
initiatives occasionally turn up to meet the long-felt need of human studies, in most schools the human
is still notoriously absent.
What image of man is offered and cultivated by the official and hidden curriculum of our national
primary and secondary education, by the ethos of schools and teachers To what extent does school
socialise people for the society of knowledge at least in its wider and deeper sense, or maybe for the
society of responsibility and giving Are there in Hungary any movement-like or institutionalised
alternatives to the conceptions of public education, which are founded on more or less reduced images
on man
1. Learning about man: a new subject in the Hungarian schools
in the early 90s
The possibility of teaching Learning about man as a subject in primary and secondary schools came
up already in the year preceding the change of regime. 1 This conception was not born in academic
workshop; it came into being rather as a practical response to the challenge set on the one hand by the
acute lack of knowledge of the human being, as experienced in schools, on the other hand by the
growing possibilities of initiation and action in consequence of the change of regime in 1989.
Learning about man, which merges descriptive and normative human sciences, was taught in 1990 in
a dozen, from 1993 already in 50-60 primary and secondary schools, from 1989 at two teachertraining
colleges, in the following years at other colleges, and from 1993 at the University of Pécs.
After the change of regime we worked out a subject (under the name Learning about man) in which
descriptive (in the first place psychology and sociology) and normative (philosophical anthropology,
ethics) human sciences formed a synthesis. The conception of the new subject at colleges and
universities is demonstrated well by my irregular textbook (Kamarás, 2007) formed as a platonian
dialog 2 , in which ten fictive are talking about what man is.
1 In the work team of the National Core Curriculum (NCC) responsible for the cultural domain Man and Society,
led by Péter Szebenyi
2 The biologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the philosopher, the theologian, the poet, a 10-year-old boy, an
18-year-old girl, an old woman of the country, an unemployed semi-skilled worker, an Australian aborigine and
a mysterious old man
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