After World War II, the Hungarian education sciences (including history of education) became a part of the ideologically dominated discursive field, began to follow new Soviet role models and argumentations, rooted in Marxism-Leninism (Németh, 2016). The discipline developed under double pressures of communist expectations and profession: political intentions influenced every research, in which scholars “translated” the directives of the central bodies of the party. To prove my main thesis, I will introduce two contrasting paradigmatic models, case studies from the early and late Kádár Era, showing history of education during work: 1. The first type of functioning based on the logic of economy planning: in 1957-1958 the Scientific and Cultural Department of the Party ordered a “perspectival” program from the National Pedagogical Institute (OPI) for three years to support the proposed changes of polytechnic education (to the educational decision-making mechanism, see: Somogyvári, 2019). The task was to divide the central principles into smaller topics and construct educational narratives of the socialist pedagogy. From this point of view, the history of education was a tool in developing and building a future communist country and consciousness (Simon, 1965). Some archival sources and contemporary articles, books are available to reconstruct these results. 2. In the mid-1980s several initiatives arose by different scholars in the earlier mentioned Institute to explore and understand the past without ideological limitations and Party control. Interviews were made with ex-leaders of the educational administration; these sociologically orientated studies used modern western methodologies (e.g. Halász, 1986). The strengthening voice of the profession led to a flourishing period in the next decade; oral histories and luckily remained interviews mean the basic corpus of this model to interpret (Eick, 2011). A lot of questions emerge, while reflecting this special situation of the discipline, most of them are related to the “struggle for intellectual liberation” (Ķestere, 2014), discussions in which political and professional issues are entangled inseparably. This work meant a big challenge in demythologising our educational past (Depaepe, 2012), by expressing various prospects in the age of “history wars” (Wils & Verschaffel, 2012).

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