Schools and Gypsies:
Who Fails Who?

...

Eszter Rádai: Are you hoping that Hungarian accession to the EU will begin a new era for the country's half-million Gypsies? Can accession really change the disadvantages and prejudices they suffer, or will it just affect the tiny number involved in Gypsy politics?

Tibor Derdák: I'm not just hoping. The changes for which we shall have the Union to thank were not postponed to the date of accession. We're already profiting from them and the process has been underway for some time.
The EU has long been a benchmark to which we can refer. People wanting to attain something in this field have long argued that "this is what the EU expects." Everyone believed us, although we knew that it did not matter that much. Slovakia, for instance, has not shown any improvement in the way it manages the problems of the Gypsies, but Slovakia has been accepted as a Union member in the same round as Hungary. The Gypsies in Slovakia are outcasts, their state is worse than it is here. Although their proportion of the population is even higher, I know of no serious initiative. In Hungary, on the other hand, not only leaders of the Roma community but also other political forces and politicians sympathetic towards the Gypsies and feeling a responsibility for them, have been able to apply pressure by saying, 'Wait a minute, Europe won't let you leave things in that state.'

Are you saying you've been bluffing in a good cause?

Certainly, we've been bluffing, which means that now, inside the Union, where there are real prospects at last, we aren't facing a completely new situation. We just have to continue what we've been experimenting with and practising for some time. For instance, we succeeded in using EU entry to stop the classifying of a mounting proportion of Gypsy children (20 per cent in recent years) as disadvantaged, sending them to special schools. This school year many of the schools have not started special classes- it's not Euro-compatible to do so. Referring to models in EU countries was how we managed to introduce a system of after-school tuition involving NGOs to make a secondary or university education a realistic goal for the Gypsy young. For this, we introduced a French system known as accompagnement ŕ la scolarité. There have been some splendid individual initiatives in the city of Pécs, in a run-down mining area, where there is an excellent Gypsy play-school operating alongside one of the day nurseries. Also an art club for handicapped children run by an art teacher at a special school. Thus, they published an edition of Petőfi's epic poem John the Valiant in Beashi, a Gypsy language, English and Hungarian, with excellent illustrations. Generally speaking, a single well-trained and committed teacher can work miracles. As well as that, there's some real solidarity been engendered: within the Gypsy community among people in different situations, and in a section of the majority society that feels and accepts some responsibility- and this works in both directions. This too is based on European patterns.

When you were a young man at university in the mid-1980s, what led you towards the Gypsy community? How did you come into contact with them? As a teacher or as a sociologist?

As both. To start with, I was majoring in Hungarian and French, but I switched to sociology because I recognised that they were dealing with things in the department that were difficult to approach otherwise.
Poverty, for example. It was something I hadn't encountered before in a comfortable, so-called "Communist family", but I knew it existed. My father and grandfather were 'worker-cadres', who rose to high positions with low qualifications. Poverty for us seemed to be something you could overcome. I was born in a district where there weren't any really poor people. The teachers at the so-ciology department took us students in groups to poor areas, to show us what it was like. To me it seemed very odd, but the existence of poverty was denied in 'socialist' Hungary. One of the regime's most important declared aims was to better the lot of the poor and eliminate poverty. So it was not done, indeed forbidden to talk about existing poverty and the poor. And my interest, of course, was aroused by the Gypsies, because there was obviously something wrong about their condition. I was also interested at that time in the semi-legal or illegal world of the free churches and sects. I wrote my dissertation on the work of a Protestant movement, the Calvinist Mission for Saving Drunkards. I was beginning to deal with things you couldn't officially hear about at the time, whose existence was being ignored or even denied.

Your student research work took you among your subjects, sharing their lives.

Yes, but when you live among people, sympathy is replaced by participation. You feel sympathy for people who are not like you.

When you graduated, you took a job as a social worker in Koőbánya, one of Budapest's working-class districts, but they soon got rid of you. Why?

The official view at that time was that social problems were diseases and people had to be cured of them, and so the head of our institution was a district nurse. That led to all kinds of conflicts, because the young sociologists working there thought that social problems could not and should not be treated with medicine. So they soon bid us goodbye. We didn't want to hold surgeries, like white-coated doctors, telling other people what to do with their lives. Instead we were always out in the field, trying to resolve the problems where they appeared. Later I was thrown out of the Institute of Alcohol Studies for similar reasons.
I was showing too much interest in Alcoholics Anonymous, which was successful in the West, but unauthorised in Hungary at that time, although alcoholism was one of the country's gravest social problems both in scale and consequences. This was when Gorbachev was pursuing his campaign against alcoholism in the Soviet Union. Not with much success, but alcohol was one area where social problems were at least being addressed in the Communist countries. My bosses may have been right to fear that real methods of treatment would upset the established order. Alcoholics are not revolutionaries, but drinking is a kind of revolt against hopelessness. The way to overcome it is to restore the individual's social relations, to restore civil society. That was strongest taboo under the regime, so my professional efforts were 'banned'...

But you didn't lose your enthusiasm.

No, I was more amazed than anything. I hadn't heard of anything like that before. I'd been taught at home that this world of ours was working well and to "speak your mind boldly and things will advance."

So off you went among the Gypsies to find out what life was really about?

I didn't go among them intending to learn. In fact I thought I already had a good idea what life was like. I was thinking how I'd show these sociologists in Budapest it was possible to go among the people.

Like the Narodniki?

I've always been put off by them. My model were the Anglo-Saxon social-anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski. They were paid by colonial powers to find out how all the many different peoples who found themselves in the British Empire lived. At the time, I imagined that my own research interests were leading me to the Gypsies, but I know now I was trying to discover what kind of life I really wanted.

The first stage was Southern Hungary, the Magyarmecske Primary School.

Yes, then I moved to Besence. The village between the two is Gilvánfa, a Gypsy village- even the mayor is a Gypsy. That's where I spent most of my time later on. Then I moved as the families moved, I lived in Pécs for a while, then in Hidas, in the Gypsy colony, and now in Mánfa. Apart from that, I've spent various lengths of time in several other villages in Baranya County.
At first I taught in a small general school in Magyarmecske, where I had to do everything, if one of the teachers fell ill, I had to fill in for two or three extra subjects. When the PE teacher was called up for his national service, I became the PE teacher. I also taught math, which I really don't understand. My pupils were extremely poor, most of them Gypsies. This, incidentally, is the district of Hungary with the highest unemployment- across the River Dráva from Croatia.

You wanted to get as far as possible from Budapest?

No, I wanted to teach Gypsy children and build on the knowledge of the language of Gypsies I'd gained at university. I'd teach them French and they'd teach me Gypsy.

A straight swop?

A fair deal, yes. I give and I get something in return. Although the idea of exchanging things of value is largely unknown there. They live in a very depressed world with nothing to exchange, because they own nothing. There's a kind of property community among them. It's not polite, for instance, to say thank you for anything- that was very odd for me- because it would mean you were keeping track of what was being given and it would need reciprocating. Reciprocation would break up the property community.

Do you live in this property community? Do you identify with the community that much?

I do actually. More and more. For instance, I bought a house jointly with a family that had lived in a Gypsy colony up to then, but you couldn't build there, while the money I had wasn't enough to buy a place.

I've been to that house. You have a room of your own and your things in it, but the door's not locked, everyone can come and go as they please.

Well, I'm a poor teacher, and this is a poor family from the Gypsy colony, about twenty of them. But the room where my bed is, where I keep my computer, where I charge my telephone and have my books is just mine. Well, not entirely, because the children use the computer as well. Their grandmother can't read or write, but they send e-mails to their mums in Copenhagen... They are very receptive to the world that is opening before them. They find that Europe offers more opportunities than the Gypsy colony in the village. So you might say it is a fortunate encounter. I have learnt that the socialisation these children bring from home allows them to hold their own in a globalising world. A large number of people growing up together within a few square metres means more experience of communication. It gives an ability and knowledge we need above all to hold our own in Europe. And just imagine, it is provided by the culture of Gypsy homes, in families living in the deepest destitution. Seen from Europe, the Gypsy question doesn't look as recalcitrant as it does from the Hungarian Parliament. Growing up in a crowd of people is a cultural asset that Europe values.

Not many in Hungary will agree with you. Most teachers, for instance, take a different view.

Yes, a great many teachers talk disparagingly of Gypsy families- "what we've built up at school by the evening collapses again at home by the morning." Then they talk of the family holding children back and an environment short of stimulus that Gypsy families are supposed to surround their children with. The reverse is true. These families provide real emotional support and there is an incredibly eventful and lively life in them. Anyone who has worked with Gypsy children knows it's a treat to be among them, they make for such lively company. There certainly are a number of things they bring from home that the school finds hard to cope with, but that's not the home's fault, it's the school's failure, or more precisely that of the education system.
You see, Gypsies grow up in large communities, not the bourgeois nuclear families typical of the towns. And naturally there's no such thing as the children's room. When we take them to camp and there's a separate bed for everyone, they are unhappy and start moving in with each other, saying they would 'die' if they had to spend a night all alone in a separate bed. There is no cradle. They don't cage babes in little pens. They keep them on their laps all the time. Not the same lap, of course. The mother wouldn't be able to stand that all day, but they'll be in the grandmother's lap, the brother-in-law's, the godfather's or the cousin's lap. Meanwhile the baby is learning that it is different being in one lap from being in another, and how to make sure it's grandmother's lap, which is the best place, and they have usually found out how to achieve that by the time they're a year old. They learn to talk the same way: they are exposed to constant banter, and when they start to walk, they find that one person they totter to has this kind of humour and another that, and they have to be ready for the unexpected from everyone. You can't expect one answer to a single question. There'll be a thousand, depending on the mood, the position in the family or the character of the person you ask. But this extremely varied culture is no advantage in school. Thus Gypsy children have learnt that if they want to say something, they have to compete for the right to be heard amongst the crowd of brothers and sisters and cousins. This behaviour goes against the style of the Prussian-type school system, with a teacher up front explaining things on the board and the children only allowed to speak if they are spoken to; it counts as naughtiness, indiscipline or 'not being ready for school.' So another cultural positive from home turns out to be a negative, a shortcoming, a minus point. This, I cannot insist too much, is the fault of Prussian-style teaching, not the child's or the family's.

You're an adviser to the ministry commissioner for the education of disadvantaged and Gypsy children. What should teachers do?

It has been largely realised in many parts of the world that you have to let children do things, you have to make them 'work', not force them to sit still in a hard school desk, but let them move as they want. Meanwhile you encourage them to cooperate with each other, because that is the best way of evening out the differences in standards and culture within the group. We should be forgetting 'frontal classwork', which knows only one form of cooperation, whispering the answer, and that is forbidden. Let the children sit down at a table and be given joint tasks, tasks that can only be done by cooperating- that's the only way to succeed together and individually. This method is used in Hungary in a few schools- and everywhere with good results, so the situation is not hopeless.
If the children are taught like that, there will be no problem in the classroom about one child from a doctor's family and others not being able to read and write properly yet. At the Education Ministry we advise schools to educate children from different backgrounds together. The new watchword in education policy is integration.
Laws and regulations are being shaped to make it worthwhile for schools to teach Gypsy children along with the others, because that will earn them more funding and more respect, and institutions not prepared to do so will find themselves at a grave disadvantage. I am spending most of my time on this at present.

You were a member of the first freely elected Parliament in 1990–94. What took you into politics?

The chance to try my hand with my friends at founding institutions. For example, something we founded at that time was the Gandhi Gimnázium, the one and only academic secondary school in the region for the Gypsy community, and it has since become famous. What prompted us was the conclusion that if Gypsy children were not attempting the secondary school-leaving certificate, that is they were excluded from secondary education, we had to found a Gypsy minority school. It is based on an alternative approach to teaching, which it was possible to 'sell' in the early 1990s as a service for an ethnic minority. It is a typically Eastern European concept that people in Western Europe cannot understand. The school has allowed us to prove to teachers in neighbouring schools in Pécs that Gypsy children can get their certificate as well and can go on to complete university. Of course it is hard to imagine a secondary school-leaving certificate and a degree for children who could not read a newspaper at the age of 12–13, cannot understand a map, and cannot find a word in a dictionary. They haven't a desk at home and they haven't a relative who attended secondary school. Your average teacher will see these as dim children "without good capabilities", as the euphemism goes in Hungary. Since then, the school has achieved outstanding results in some fields with these pupils. It has become the city's best gymnasium in some respects. The Gandhi children are best when it comes to communication, for instance in student drama or oral skills in foreign languages. Hardly surprising in the light of what I said about the upbringing in poor families. So it's not true that 95 per cent of the Gypsy community cannot continue their education. It is the schools that cannot do their job.

What prompted the idea of the Collegium Martineum at Mánfa founded in the mid-1990s?

That is another track, another chance for Gypsies. We decided to start a students' hostel rather than another secondary school so that the pupils themselves could choose their next school. The funds were collected for Eastern Europeans by German Catholics. They saw it as important to give young Gypsies living like outcasts in Eastern Europe a real chance of continuing their studies. That also calls for some form of special teaching programme and the Germans liked ours. The choice is wide in Pécs. There is a bilingual secondary school with Italian as the other language of instruction, another specialising in English, and a third for those who specialise in art or mathematics. The hostel helps pupils to succeed in these schools. It would be hard or impossible for them otherwise, if they had to rely on their home background, a gimnázium is based on the values, experiences, vocabulary and tastes of the middle class. Our children lacked all that for a start. They do not listen to serious music or for that matter to rock, only to disco or folk music as played on a synthesizer. They cannot swim or skate. They have never been abroad and they do not possess passports. On the other hand, they can chop wood, they know what to bring home from the woods, and they know all the types of mushrooms, but none of that is much use at a gimnázium.

In other words, you provide an environment in the hostel that simulates the life of a middle-class family and its ideas, habits and general knowledge?

You could say that. The requisites of a middle-class culture are available in Mánfa, but it's also important they should feel all of one piece not having to break the ties that bind them to their childhood and family. There's no need for them to change their characters or deny their earlier selves. They can always switch back to their own background, whatever it may be. Some of our pupils come from slightly more prosperous homes and some from poorer ones, where there isn't even a table. Hungarian society needs them. Let there be a section of the middle class that happens to be Gypsy as well. But that means forgetting a concept still regrettably current in education. That's the idea that a family holding a child back has to be removed from his life, that the child has to be lifted out and taken off as far as possible; that it's better if the family abandons him altogether. That still happens with a great many children. All I want to say is that the Gypsy family is sacred, just as sacred as any other family. So when you establish a hostel, you have to think all the time how to make what goes on here attractive to the families.

Now there's a second students' hostel at Ózd. How does it differ from the first?

In just that. Again it was a Western European initiative; the EU spent 170 million forints on it. Gypsies make up a quarter of the population of Ózd, a northern town that suffered worst after the change of system, when its 'socialist' heavy industry collapsed. So the decision-makers pricked the map and set the task: a talent-developing college for Gypsies. But there was no application process and no team of teachers able to cope with the challenge came together. There wasn't a democratic organization on the Gypsy side to act as a partner, either. Very poor use will be made of an endowment under undemocratic conditions like that, and the bigger the endowment the poorer it will be.

Is that when you became involved?

Once I had expressed my opinion, I was asked to act by the organization that had provided the money, Phare, which is the Western European programme concerned. The EU delegation was astounded by the practice of plucking children out of their family background. But ever since the Empress Maria Theresa issued a decree on the subject in the eighteenth century, it has been considered self-evident that a Gypsy family is no partner in this, it pulls the child back, so that the county administration and the heads of the college could not understand what the donors' problem was. Then we formed a society of young Gypsies who had managed to continue their education, so that they could share their experiences with those at the college. This kind of 'youth-leader' work develops commitment and solidarity among and provides a model for the younger ones, so it works both ways. Social psychology speaks of a self-help group. I came across the concept at the beginning of my career, in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my recommending its adoption cost me my job, as I said earlier. I later lost my job twice for the same reason when trying to introduce the method with some colleagues in teaching. The Hungarian teaching profession finds it very difficult to work with such an organization, but with the wind of Europe behind us, we managed to incorporate the model into the 2003 Act on Public Education.
Ózd and the rest of the impoverished northern industrial belt of high unemployment proved a hard nut to crack. There was long, hard resistance in the gimnáziums, the college and the county to treating the Gypsies as equal partners. As one would expect, the results were poor. After all, the secondary-school-leaving examination was meant for citizens, not serfs. Drop-out rates in Ózd are unimaginable. Meanwhile the failure rate provides arguments for people out to show that Gypsy children are not meant for schools. That's one reason why the EU would do better not to waste money on ill-founded undertakings.
It should always insist on professional expertise and a democratic mode of organization on the part of those spending the money.

What sort of results did Mánfa achieve?

There were no drop-outs there initially, while the German money lasted, but there was a sharp drop in standards when it began to run out. (The government took the view that it had no responsibility for the matter and so did the Hungarian Catholic Church, which is the owner of the college in a manner of speaking.) But the tried and experienced teaching staff knew roughly what to do and had a thousand solutions up its sleeve. At Ózd, on the other hand, there's no ready solution, mainly because the eastern half of the country lacks a sufficient number of teachers who believe that a large number of Gypsies can pass the secondary school-leaving exams. They can't imagine how young people living in absolute poverty, with weak reading and writing skills, can be brought to university standards. Teaching work needs truly committed people who believe in their mission, but there aren't any to be found in Ózd. Those available tend to be people who get on with their work and will perhaps realise that it is worth it a few years later. Teachers with faith had to be imported from Pécs and Budapest. Meanwhile the institutional background is emerging. A county self-help network has been set up by educated young Gypsies, mainly from Szendrőlád. It has been named after Bhim Rao Ambedkar, who played a prominent part in suppressing the Indian caste system.

When do you think Gypsy children will approach the Hungarian average levels of educational attainment?

At long last this process is on the way all over the country. Not just because of government intervention, but because of the diminishing number of children. There's talk of closing schools, and after years of a teacher shortage, teachers are now afraid their jobs may go. So they and the secondary schools feel a great need to attract Gypsy children. The trouble is that Hungarian secondary schools are incapable of holding onto them. But if we can make modern teaching methods available and produce structures to assist them, success will certainly follow. The children will play their part, you can be sure of that.

 

Eszter Rádai
is on the staff of the weekly Élet és Irodalom. She has published several volumes of interviews.
Tibor Derdák
is a teacher, sociologist and founder of several educational institutions, an adviser in
the Ministry of Education to the commissioner for the education of disadvantaged and Roma children.