Serious Children

Not very many parents wait at the school gates for their children. Hungarians in their thirties and forties are too busy holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Grandparents come instead, when they can; and when they can not, eight-year-old Peter takes five-year-old Moni home himself, right across Budapest with three changes of bus if necessary. Mum’s Volvo-run is not an option in middle- and working-class Hungary.

All this means that children are self-reliant to a degree no longer imaginable in the West. By and large they are serious, too, about their work. By Christmas the first grade is reading fluently and writing in a not yet very neat cursive hand; by the end of the year they know their multiplication tables up to 10. By Western standards the curriculum is narrow but rigorous, and teachers put their back into their work, for pitifully small financial reward. As a result, by the end of elementary school everyone has mastered basic literacy and numeracy.

children, education, school