Since the Archives took up the responsible task of reflecting on the current distortions in history teaching in Hungary with a very successful free accredited teachers’ training course, five years have passed. Soon after the expiry of the accreditation, there are plans to launch a new course in a different structure and with different content.
The course lecturers were historians András Mink (Blinken OSA) and Krisztián Ungváry. The first free course began in February 2017 on the initiative of our former colleague, Anikó Kövecsi (whose tasks were later taken over by Fanni Andristyák), with a limited number of participants of twenty individuals for eight occasions and thirty lessons in total. The organizers and lecturers are proud to inform that over the five-year period more than sixty history teachers received their official credits, and many more teachers tuned into the course because of their individual interests. Some of the teachers completing the course later also participated in the Archives’ various educational programs with their students.
In the history of 20th-century Hungary, there are many significant and fateful turns of events that were perceived by the various groups of the Carpathian basin population vastly differently, and which, as it is stressed in the short course description, still serve as a base to ongoing professional, ideological and political debates. One of the main aims of the course was to ensure techniques to investigate the source of this division while providing a platform to improve critical thinking with an open mind. The course was designed to initiate teamwork and enhance the activity of the participants in doing source analyses together while actively exchanging professional ideas.
Based on the feedback of the course participants, the original aims of the course were achieved, and the pace of the enrollment in the last few years clearly indicated that this was a well-designed and well-liked educational program.
Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives