Settling for a "good enough" school

Contradictions of middle class reproduction in a small town in illiberal Hungary

Bibliographic Data

ID2056875
AuthorsAlexandra Szőke (0000-0002-2097-2726, ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, corresponding author), Cecília Kovai (0000-0001-8153-0342, ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies), Réka Geambașu (0000-0003-4859-4891, Babeș-Bolyai University)
Year2024
Volume49
Issue4
Pages535-557
Publication date2024-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDialectical Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0304-4092 • E-ISSN: 1573-0786
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s10624-024-09743-x
OpenAlexW4403931268
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited38

The politics of the Orbán regime, in power in Hungary since 2010, are reshaping the possibilities for middle class reproduction and social mobility, as revealed through our analysis of parental dilemmas around school choice and future aspirations in a peripheral small town. As the main targets of re-industrialization and an important voter base for the regime, small towns are particularly relevant localities for studying the transformations of middle-class reproduction. Globally, anxieties over class reproduction pushes parents to invest more intensely in their children's education, whereas increasingly worrying about the detrimental effects of related pressures on their child's well-being. In small towns in the global semi-periphery, parental dilemmas around schooling appear in a particularly acute form due to the limited possibilities for social advancement, the high financial and emotional costs that mobility requires, and the racialised dimension of localised class relations. We contend that policies of the Orbán regime, such as the 'churchification' of education and the privileging of technical middle schools, have further reshaped local possibilities and routes of advancement. The tension between the pervasive promise of middle-class advancement through education and the locally rooted assessment of realistic employment possibilities exposes the contradictions of the current regime and helps to grasp the localised consequences of its socio-economic re-engineering. As in the studied context class is strongly racialised, we examine the strategies and dilemmas of middle class parents of the ethnic majority, and Roma parents who aspire to become middle class in a relational way, revealing how ethnicity further complicates middle class reproduction in Hungarian peripheral small towns

Biology · Class (philosophy · Epistemology · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Sociology · Working class · Global Educational Reforms and Inequalities · Law · Philosophy · Rural development and sustainability · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics · Ecology

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