18 March 2003

Todays presentations were about the School System and about Minorities.
Csupor Mariann, Berkovits Ildikó and Derzsi-Pap Csilla (that’s me) did the School system. András, Nate and Ábel –the exchange students from the U.S.- contributed in telling the audience what american education is like in reality. An entire part was based on personal experience- our students being future teachers, and there was also a questionnaire at the end which fired up a debate. It turned out that the hungarian government spends more on higher education, but hungarian students still have to find part-time jobs next to studying just like american students. The next issue was wether /or how/ having a job during years of higher education affects studying...

The second presentation this morning was given by Nate Tassinari and Bikits Milán, their subject was Minorities. Nate spoke about Hungarians who live in the Carpathian basin right outside the hungarian border. These territories once belonged to Hungary, but were taken away in a treaty signed in the early part of the 20th century. The ethnographic composition of the population was not taken into consideration when the borders were defined, so this resulted in the present situation in which about 2 million hungarians live abroad- and they are considered as minorities of the surrounding countries respectively. Bikits Milán spoke about minorities within Hungary. He pointed out that there are not only minorities of language, religion or colour, but also of income and of sexual behavior- though the first one is most common. Hungary has a great number of minorities, to namea few: german, slavic, gipsy, roumanian. It was striking to see the distance of wher the largest number of people belonging to the german minority live and the Austrian border (the place where most germans probably came from). The situation is the same with the largest slovak ( belonging to slavic) minority group: it is situated far from the Slovak border to the north of Hungary. A conribution of a personal experience was made by Zuzmo (Molnár Mária) who lives in Slovakia but she is hungarian and studies in Budapest. The debate that followed concerned the increase of the gipsy minority in Hungary.

A third presentation was given on Patriotism today- the details will be included tomorrow...

The atmosphere of the conference is getting better day by day as more and more people have the confidence to add to the disputes.

Budapest, 2003, March 19th Prepared by: Csilla Derzsi Pap