Critical Choices for Hungary

|| Contents || Introduction... || Unemployment ||
|| Poverty || Crime || Youth at Risk ||
|| Grading || Hungary's National Security ||

Introduction 

According to social scientists when we are children we gain those skills, and attitudes on which our public social skills are based. This is when we learn who to count on when we are in trouble, and when it is fair to expect help from others or from the state. This is when we learn what our rights are, and this is when we learn if our rights can be used to help us reach our goals, or if these rights exist only on paper and are of little use to us in our everyday life. 

This work was created as a reflection of the school's socializing role. Its aim is to help students understand what it means to be a citizen of Hungary today by encouraging the development of a discussion in the nation's schools (both within and without the curriculum) of real problems affecting students' everyday existence. 

Here you will become acquainted with a method that offers students a way to take part in the public discussion of how to solve Hungary's most burning problems. This method, or rather the civil discussion groups that use it, are called Civitas Kor. We believe that there little value to citizenship education which does not give students the chance to become acquainted and compare their ideas with differing points of view. 

The chapters and layout of this book have been designed specifically with this in mind. Each chapter introduces the reader to three alternative solutions to, and theories about the problem at hand. In the course of a discussion of Poverty, for instance, the reader will not find any official version of what he should think about the problem, but will instead find a discussion of views held by many people in Hungary today. 

Arguments and counter-arguments clash in the discussion of individual responsibility and social welfare. We believe that it should not be up to a textbook writer to decide what students should think about poverty. It should be up to students themselves to discover what they believe about poverty as a community of young citizens through a comparison of, and competition between their views. 

We want to make it clear that this is not a textbook. Just as it is impossible to learn how to play football without playing with others, so it is impossible to master the skills needed to become a politically responsible and active citizen by merely reading a few books. Real civic learning only occurs in debate with others. Such discussions can serve as a base for a political culture - and without such a culture any reference to democracy is a reference to a mirage. 

The Hungarian Issues Forums 

While it may be true that action and words are commonly defined as polar opposites, our words play a significant role in making changes in the world. When we make statements or pledge to do things we are, in effect, acting with our words. In civil life the sharing of thoughts through open dialogue is used to form society. A pluralistic and open dialogue is at the heart of public life,. This is where civil, non-partisan political action can come into play. The Hungarian Issues Forums (Civitas Kdr) program was founded in 1992 to establish and strengthen civic thought and deliberation in Hungary. In the interest of reaching this goal we have established a network of civic organizations, individuals and schools throughout the nation. We have attempted to elicit a "civil standpoint" on problems such as unemployment and youth problems by using the 'issue books' we have developed. These books, in the course of time, have incorporated the ideas worked out by the network itself. 

Who Do the Hungarian Issues Forums Serve? 

The Hungarian Issues Forums are not meant to take the place of any interest group. Instead they comprise an experiment - an attempt to discover whether the Hungarian public has the insight, tolerance, and political wisdom necessary to justify its oft cited irritation with the work of elected policy-making bodies. The long-term goal of Hungarian Issues Forums is to assist in the development of a well-informed, tolerant public, capable of articulating its interests and making decisions. 

The Key to the Initiative: A Civic Technique. 

One of the problems with public life is that citizens, as well as politicians, are new at filling in the roles required of them by a democracy. During the forums participants discuss the country's most burning issues in a way which takes in all aspects of the issue. Using forum techniques all the implications of the various 'solutions' to the problem at hand are explored. Thus the participants become immune to political "wonder cures", and are transformed from reluctant "consumers" of media and politics, into active "producers" of public discourse. During the course of the forum the participants examine three or four policy choices in detail. These choices reflect the distribution of public opinion concerning the given issue. After talking through each choice's advantages, disadvantages, arguments and counter arguments the participants will attempt to forge a solution which, even if not completely identical to any single participant's opinions, is deemed acceptable by the group as a whole. The opinion generated in the forum becomes truly public only when the it has been heard by others - including policy-makers. After a forum, local newspapers, television and radio stations, and politicians are informed of its results. 
 

|| Contents || Introduction... || Unemployment ||
|| Poverty || Crime || Youth at Risk ||
|| Grading || Hungary's National Security ||