In 1969, Hungary firstly participated in a western educational project since the communist takeover (1949); it was the Six Subject Survey, initiated by the IEA. Civic Education produced a big problem in the research, as Professor Árpád Kiss, the driving force of the Hungarian team wrote in a letter to Neville Postlethwaite: we couldn’t record these tests, «because our aims and objectives in Civic Education deviate from yours in so many respects»(Kiss, 1969). Our question is targeting to this core point: What are the meanings of the umbrella term civic/citizenship education in a non-democratic society? The timeframe of our overview will last from the restauration of the communist power after the revolution (1957) to the crisis of the existing socialism (mid-1980s), the so-called Kádár Era. We would like to highlight the discrepancies between the official (and idealistic) images of conscious, active socialist citizens and the reality of different reactions to these needs from apathy to imitate the requested attitudes. The ideological scheme was stable during these decades, but the interpretations of the key notions (socialist democracy, socialist citizenship, internationalism, and so on) differed in many ways. According to an overall accepted hypothesis in Hungary, the state incorporated and nationalized its citizens through the obligatory political socialization of the schools after WW2 (Szabó, 2000; Jakab, 2022). The direction was opposite to the practice of Western countries in that time: civic education did not speak about rights, autonomy and individual conditions needed to defend from the encroachments of a strong state, but to subordinate these to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Contemporary analyses about the history of Hungarian citizenship education usually started the detailing story from the 1990s (Dancs & Fülöp, 2020; Hera & Szeger, 2015; Holle & Ványi, 2022): we would like to show the roads leading to here.

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