Teachers, Educational Experts, and Scholars of Education at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the 19th Century

Abstract

We analyze the first three generations of members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—celebrating the 200th anniversary of its founding—based on the collective biographical database created for the bicentenary. Our aim is to determine what proportion of the 19th-century academic elite consisted of teachers, educational experts, and scholars engaged in the theory of education. This allows us to see vividly how, as the Academy gradually developed into a more professional scientific institution, the number of teachers reaching the peak of the intellectual elite declined—quite rapidly. At the same time, during the establishment of the national education system, virtually every representative of educational innovation and every key figure in educational administration became an academician—regardless of their scientific excellence. The same, however, cannot be said of scholars of education. Up until the mid-19th century, educational scholars displayed remarkable thematic diversity. This openness disappeared by the final third of the century: educational science came to be represented exclusively by advocates of conservative Catholic pedagogy. It was not until the early 20th century that even a knowledgeable expert on Herbart was admitted to the academic elite, while newer approaches remained excluded for even longer.