This presentation will show how teacher training and high school education changed in the school system after 1945 (Luhmann 1982, Meyer and Ramirez 1999). The main question of the presentation: How Soviet occupation (as a special form of colonisation) influenced Hungarian education and culture. In which forms the communist ideology appeared in education. How the retired teachers reflected on their activities, school work, career during the dictatorship.

The research analyses the history of education after 1945 in Hungary. It focuses on the teacher training for the secondary grammar schools and underlines the content and structural turns in teacher training and the changes in school education. It is among others about the new mass teacher training, ideological transformation, the influence of Marxism and Leninism, the introduction of Russian as a compulsory language, the reform of new teaching materials, subjects, etc. The official historical process is compared to the reflections of old teachers, who remembered their own careers and difficulties (choice of profession, learning opportunities, discrimination and perspectives) and the beauty of their work (successes, prizes, pleasures in teaching). The pedagogical canon can be contrasted with the subjective viewpoints of the individual stories.

The memories of 20 high school teachers (between 80 and 60 years of age) will present the individual paths of life, which are part of a micro-historical piece of research. These provide various possibilities to draw the difficult stages of a professional educator’s career. The reflections form an image of the teachers’ identity, of the successes and failures of their individual career and of their everyday life.

Methodologically it is based on comparative historical pedagogy (monographs, acts and school documents) and on Oral History. Qualitative techniques were used: interviews, analyses of content (Glaser, Strauss, 1967) for analysing personal stories. The historical, anthropological and sociological aspects were adopted to understand the historical past on a deeper level. The different narratives of the educators as a part of cultural memory (Assman, 1992) provide insight to their beliefs as teachers.  The interviews allowed to express the emotions too, as well, but all teachers tried to speak objectively, with well-learnt wisdom, whilst they shared interesting and new details about the everyday life of the teachers.

The study of dictatorship makes it possible to explore the past in an objective way, to analyse the two level (official educational policy and the personal career) and to compare Hungary’s situation with those other countries that have or have not experienced dictatorship.