Hungary’s government committed to support mother-tongue education across the borders

Hungarian government officials on Saturday greeted teachers and students of Hungarian schools across the borders at the start of the academic year, and pledged continued support for mother-tongue education from kindergarten to university.

State Secretary Árpád János Potápi attended the year-opening event of Hungarian schools in Slovakia in Drzkovce (Deresk) in southern Slovakia. Although the coming months may be fraught with difficulties, Hungary’s government is committed to continuing its programmes supporting mother-tongue education across the borders, as it has done for 12 years, he said. The subsidies have made quality mother-tongue education available for some 300,000 Hungarian children in the Carpathian Basin, he said. The government has contributed to the building and reconstruction of some 1,000 kindergartens, and regularly supports 50 institutes of secondary education and dormitories, as well as 8 higher-education institutes, he said.

This year, 3,675 children start learning in Hungarian-language schools in Slovakia, “which is cause for optimism,” he said.

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Péter Szilágyi, a deputy state secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, attended an event in Mali Hejivci (Kisgejoc) in western Ukraine. He said the opening ceremony was a “careful, tiny step towards peaceful daily life” in war-torn Ukraine. The Hungarian government has aided teachers’ efforts to bring stability into children’s lives in the region, and so all schools could start in-person education at the start of the academic year, he said. He thanked Ildiko Orosz, the head of the association of Hungarian teachers in Transcarpathia, for her work.

The Hungarian government’s support for kindergarten and schoolchildren, as well as “constant curricular and infrastructural development”, have made mother-tongue education across the borders competitive with “other education”, he said.