The study examines the final examination performance of students attending a state secondary school for boys. The multivariate analysis of the grades of more than 500 students over a period of fifteen years has yielded significant findings. On the one hand, contrary to national trends, students belonging to the Reformed Church achieved the highest results at this institution. On the other hand – perhaps less surprisingly – the sons of higher-status parents per- formed significantly better in their examinations. Another important outcome is that the longer a student studied at the school where the final exam was held, the greater their chances of graduating with outstanding results. These findings highlight the distinct character and formative role of individual schools as institutions of education and cultural transmission, which suggests that this institutional function should be considered as an independent factor in future analyses of similar datasets.

The city of Győr was pioneering in both the process of embourgeoisement andthe subsequent bourgeois revolution in Hungary. The present study examinesthe role of the long-standing secondary school in the life of the town, which,in this respect, was progressive in the Reform Era. The overarching theme forthe present inquiry is the significance of post-elementary education (or “highereducation” to use the contemporary term) in upward social mobility in the lat-ter years of the Estate System. Previous research has shown that the secondaryschool in Győr was predominantly used by local families. The present study ex-amines the social composition of the local urban student cohorts. The sons ofGyőr burghers comprise one third of the whole student body, and two thirdsof the local cohort. The social composition by grade shows that the number ofburghers’ children decreases in higher grades, but it remains one third of all stu-dents, and firmly over half of all local students even in the two highest grades inthe humanities. Narrowing the scope, the study focuses on the top students whoreached the graduating class (second grade in the humanities) without repeti-tion of academic years, and went on to graduate successfully. The case of the topstudent of Győr revealed that the urban bourgeoisie was not only present in thelower grades of the school, but a significant portion of them completed their sec-ondary education and continued their studies in higher education. In addition,the study also shows that the Benedictine secondary school in Győr fostered theprevalence of Hungarian language use among the educated bourgeoisie, to anequal extent as the Piarists in Pest. Finally, it is observed that only a relativelysmall portion of the top students continued to live in Győr, which is explainedby the upward social mobility attained by their continuing education.

Similarly to developed European countries, secondary education in Hungary comprised a unique institutional framework in the nineteenth century. The core of this framework was the traditional secondary school with a curriculum based on Latin and classical education, and the primary aim of preparing students for higher education. Besides this type of secondary school, modern types emerged from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, such as Realschul, lower secondary schools, vocational teacher training schools and schools of trade and commerce. These took over part of the remit of traditional secondary schools and fundamentally diversified the institutional framework hitherto dominated by the traditional secondary schools, boarding schools and lyceums. The differentiation in this field naturally brought about a more varied distribution of students across the widening range of available secondary education institutions. The first half of the study explores the social characteristics of the distribution of students using data available about occupation, demographic and education in the 1910 Census. This analysis suggests that although traditional secondary schools remain prevalent in the first decade of the twentieth century, the more modern options for secondary education also developed into real alternatives on the educational landscape. Although students who wished to emulate their fathers’ high degree of education still typically chose traditional secondary schools, they ceased to form the absolute majority. The study suggests that the institutional modernisation process of secondary education did not result in social isolation and exclusivity for the more traditional types of secondary schools. The second half of the essay is a dynamic study of the student body of traditional secondary schools between 1882 and 1910, which not only confirms but also complements the findings discussed previously: while the students of this school type became more diverse as the schools became accessible for emerging modern-age social groups, the proportion of students from educated families somewhat decreased. At the same time, the largest subset of the student body in 1910 is still made up of of students from educated families, which lent a unique comprehensive character to the social profile of traditional secondary schools in this era. This character is best interpreted in the context of the influence of all available types of secondary education at the time, and the findings not only provide insight into social history, but also important lessons for the education policy makers of today.

The study examines the social composition of the student body at a unique institution of higher education, the College of Physical Education, Budapest, based on college registers from its foundation to the time of solidifying the one-party system in Hungary. The basic figures reveal a slightly higher number of men than women, and suggest that nearly half of the student body came from urban backgrounds, more than twenty-five percent from the capital, while another twenty-five percent came from rural communities. The religious composition more or less reflects the proportions of contemporary society, although Jews were significantly underrepresented. The analysis shows the presence of a female group from the Budapest elite in the early years, which shrank during the years of economic depression and the post-war coalition period. Parallel to this process, other groups are shown to have gathered ground in this period, such as those of the so-called petit intelligentsia (officers, teachers) and economically independent men with children.

„One has to work hard to be a »Honoracior«”. An Interview with Zoltán Fallenbüchl.

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This paper applies the method of investigating the demand and supply characteristics in the social historical analysis of 19th century secondary education in Hungary, emphasizing the demand instead of the supply for education. It would like to clarify the impact of cultural, structural and individual factors on the increasing need for higher education and on the chance of schooling in a period, when inequality in the chances of schooling was a normal phenomenon. Therefore, analysis of personal sources, investigation of memoirs on schooling and career of four noblemen stand in the focus of this study. The subjective evaluations in these personal writings are compared with the contemporary normative texts on the regulation of education. The second part of the paper highlights the role of higher education in the system of values of the different groups of nobility, which were uniformly privileged but were culturally and financially divergent in the late estate society of Hungary. On the basis of the above mentioned analysis we can conclude that higher education was a norm for the elite layer of nobility on the one hand, and it was a model to follow for people of lower nobility regarding social mobility.

Nincs absztrakt.