The Revolution of 1956, for a short time though, interrupted the continuity of the Hungarian socialist system established in the second half of the 1940s. This break appeared not only in politics but also in all sectors of the socialist system, including education too. The construction of the new socialist system supported by Nikita Khrushchev under the leadership of János Kádár already began at the beginning of November 1956, which operated until the change of regime in 1989-1990.

According to the official policy of the new system under János Kádár, Imre Nagy and his followers were mostly responsible for the revolution. They were called revisionists, sometimes right-wingers. At the same time, Mátyás Rákosi and his circle were held responsible as well, who were called dogmatists or leftists, and sometimes Stalinists. For this reason, the direction and content of the new socialist system were both anti-revisionist and anti-Stalinist. But the sin of revisionism was in all cases a greater stigma than the accusation of dogmatism. Kádár's policy worked between these two directions.

In the history of Hungarian politics, the period between 1956 and 1963 is called the stage of the completion, establishment of the new socialist system. This period is best characterized by the concepts of restauration, retaliation, and consolidation (Huszár 2003). We examine the impact of the Revolution of 1956 on socialist pedagogy in this phase of political history, as well as how the new socialist orientation emerged in pedagogy and in education science.

In our research we are looking for answers to the following questions:

1. What changes took place in the education system after 1956?

2. After the revolution, which professional-education group officially represented socialist pedagogy? Was there any conflict between different groups in socialist pedagogy?

3. What were the political, ideological and professional views of the representatives of the new socialist pedagogy after 1956? How did these views differ from those of the early 1950s?

The main sources of our research are the documents of Hungarian education policy, such as the educational policy decrees of the Socialist-Communist Party (Kardos-Kornidesz 1990). Our analysis also covers the journals of Hungarian socialist pedagogy, such as the Pedagogical Review, Public Education and the Primary School Teacher. To better understand the groups of socialist pedagogy, we used pedagogical lexicons (Nagy 1976-1979, Báthory-Falus1997).

On the whole, we can say that we are looking for the answer to the question of how political changes appeared in the field of education. In other words, we analyse the intersections of politics, ideology, and education after the Revolution of 1956.

In our study we follow the international research direction which seeks an objective description of socialist pedagogy (Gulczynska 2017, Kestere & Kalke 2018 ;, Rõuk-Walt-Wolhuter 2018, Somogyvári 2019), so our research can help most in knowing Hungarian socialist pedagogy and in comparative researches.

In analysing the history of Hungarian socialist pedagogy, we will not use the traditional pedagogical approach that seeks to exclude non-pedagogical moments from the analysis of educational issues but place the subject of our study in a political historical context (Sáska 2018). As the interpretative framework of our research, we will use the political science approach applied to the history of education, in short, the political science approach (Nagy, 1997).This concept states that in the field of education, the professional-pedagogical ideas of different groups are determined not only by pedagogical logic, but also by sociological and political science factors, to some extent. In our research, we also have used the ideological theory of Karl Mannheim, and with the help of this we have examined whether the conflicts that appeared in socialist education can be described by the concept of particular or total ideology (Mannheim 1996). At the same time, this trend also means the use of the approach of sociology of knowledge, as all social groups and their interests are socially determined (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

As a result of the Revolution of 1956, the entire Hungarian socialist system had changed significantly, including the education system too. However, continuity can be observed in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods, as both systems were socialist. The leading article of the Pedagogical Review, which appeared for the first time after the revolution, reflected on the moment of continuity with the title: Continued and Yet Started Again (Sz. N. 1957). The anti-Stalinist and anti-revisionist policies of the new socialist direction after 1956 appeared in the field of education. The Stalinists - also known as the dogmatists - who were the founders of socialist pedagogy in the early 1950s (György Ágoston, István Szokolszky, Sándor Nagy) defeated the revisionists and the rightists (Ferenc Mérei, Ferenc Pataki). The conflict between the two groups took place in the columns of the pedagogical press and was called the “Füredi-vita [Debate on Füred]”. However, regardless of their victory, the official representatives of the socialist educational science (the Stalinists, the dogmatists) lost their leading positions in education and were “pushed out” into the sphere of higher education and science, and most of the “defeated” (the revisionists, the rightists) could only return to the scientific field in the mid-sixties thanks to Kádár's reconciliation policy. After 1956, old-new socialist pedagogy faithfully followed the party’s guidelines. Its task was to convey the ideology legitimized by the Party to the field of education, as it did in the early 1950s. Their professional-scientific views fitted well into the scientific world of the socialist bloc. For example, as soon as the Khrushchevian anti-Stalinist turn in 1956 put an end to the exile of psychology in the Soviet Union, psychology was then also allowed to be practiced in the Hungarian socialist education science.

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