We Should've Made a Revolution: A Critical Rhapsody of the Hungarian Education System's Catching-Up Revolutions since 1989

From the perspective of the world-systems theory and post-colonial studies, the 1989 transition in Hungary was a part of the re-integration of former Soviet countries into an inferior position in the world system. The political-economic transition was in no sense a revolution, but a replacement of dictatorial/totalitarian state capitalism with neoliberal global capitalism. In this paper we will analyze how Hungary's semi-peripheral "catching-up revolution" consisted of stabilizing the neoliberal hegemony in education. As a result, one of the most decentralized, diverse, vertically, and horizontally stratified, and hence extremely selective education systems emerged from the gloomy Central-East European semi-periphery with exemplary diligence in conserving and reproducing social inequalities. Some 27 years after the transition, the teaching staff from Herman Ottó High School in Budapest wrote a public letter analyzing the problems of public education and criticizing the Hungarian government's interventions, which led to one of the country's biggest movements since the political-economic transition in 1989. To understand the conditions that led to these situations, wherein education under siege triggered the biggest protests since 1989, we will first describe how the Hungarian education system was affected by the political-economic transition. Second, we will point to a rupture in the post-socialist history of Hungary, namely the neoconservative interventions of Hungary's post-fascist, far-right government which has been in power since 2010. And lastly, we will try to place the teacher's movement (and, briefly, the pro-Central European University protests) in this post-socialist rhapsody by showing how they interweave with Hungary's forever lasting semi-peripheral catching-up revolution. In our conclusion we will try to propose a strategy drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein's idea of an anti-systemic Rainbow Coalition, by which new social and anti-systemic movements could organize their resistance more effectively.