Ideology, Spatial Planning, and Rural Schools: From Interwar to Communist Hungary

Abstract

The author of this paper investigates the impact of political ideologies on spatial planning and the school network, especially small schools in small settlements, in twentieth century Hungary. After WWI and the resulting vast territorial losses, the interwar nationalist-conservative regime considered the country’s cultural advantage over its neighbors as a crucial prerequisite for territorial revision and launched large-scale school development projects. In the 1930s, these initiatives became increasingly exposed to political centralization and ethnopolitical attempts. The first years after WWII witnessed the restoration of war destruction and some institutional reforms, before the post-1948 Stalinist dictatorship targeted a radical demolition of small settlements and their schools now considered as “uneconomic.” Although succeeding non-Stalinist leaderships took a more tolerant stance, their attempts of limited decentralization led to regional administrative organs exploiting their own periphery, resulting in a mass closure of rural schools in the 1970s under the motto of “rationalization.”