The development of educational history writing gained momentum in the first half of the 19th century. Its development was closely linked to the development of teacher training. Textbooks at different levels of the training played an important role in the formation of the discipline (Tröhler, 2004, 2006). According to Tröhler, the history of education had a moral, not a scientific, task. It set out the framework within which educators had to think about pedagogy, educational situations and schools. It placed contemporary pedagogical practice in a historical context and thus legitimised it.

Although Tröhler's findings are based on German and French textbooks, his conclusions are also valid for Hungarian textbooks. Hungary was in a unique position both in terms of its educational system and pedagogical thinking. The development of its culture and educational system has been strongly influenced by transnational trends (Mayer, 2019). In this respect, the role of German culture should be highlighted. Placing the history of Hungarian education in a European framework was one of the main aims of Hungarian textbooks on the history of education.

Cultural and pedagogical similarities can also be seen in the field of educational history writing. The history of education became one of the main subjects in the training of elementary school teachers in the second half of the 19th century. According to contemporary ideas, this subject provided the legitimacy of elementary school pedagogy and methodology. It also described the eminent educationalists and, through their lives, the desirable professional profiles with which teacher candidates had to identify. It was therefore a historically oriented subject, but with a strong normative content.

Although the history of education has played an important role in teacher training, little research has been undertaken into its history. This is partly due to the fact that Hungarian historiography of education has typically paid little attention to theoretical and historiographical issues. A few overview works have been produced (Szabó, Garai & Németh, 2022), but a comprehensive exploration of the history of Hungarian educational history writing is still awaited.

In my research, focusing on the training of elementary school teachers, I investigated how the construction of the "current past" and through it the legitimation of contemporary pedagogical theory and practice occurred in the Hungarian textbooks of the late 19th century.

During most of the period under study, the training of teachers for elementary schools and secondary schools was distinctly separate. In my research, I examined five textbooks on the history of education published for elementary teacher candidates in the late 19th century. I have used the method of historical source analysis.

As a result of the research, it can be concluded that the authors of the textbooks explicitly sought to link the past, the recent past and the present in their texts. They used two main means of doing so. On the one hand, they included contemporary events in the history they described, thus emphasising that the development and establishment of the system of popular education was the inevitable result of a single, uninterrupted historical process. On the other hand, these textbooks created a figure no longer to be found later, the 'contemporary classic'. The textbooks contained biographies of many living or recently deceased people, in many cases in the same form and with the same content as those of 'famous' teachers. In this way, a professional pantheon was created which represented the professional profile to be followed by teacher candidates. At the same time, they portrayed effectively that 'ordinary' teachers can also possess the qualities of great professional predecessors. The results of the research provide insights into the way early Hungarian educational history writing functioned. We can see that the dividing line between history and memory was still flexible at that time, and that the textbooks naturally included people and events within what Jan Assman calls communicative or generational memory (Assmann & Czapilka, 1995, Assman 2011). In later decades, with the professionalisation of educational history writing, the dividing line has become more fixed and textbooks have focused primarily on the description of persons and events within the scope of cultural memory.

Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511996306 Assmann, J., & Czaplicka, J. (1995). Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique, 65, 125–133. https://doi.org/10.2307/488538 Mayer, C. (2019). The Transnational and Transcultural: Approaches to Studying the Circulation and Transfer of Educational Knowledge. In E. Fuchs & E. Roldán Vera (Eds.), The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (pp. 49–68). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17168-1_2 Tröhler, D. (2004). The Establishment Of The Standard History Of Philosophy of Education and Suppressed Traditions of Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 23(5–6), 367–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-004-4450-3 Tröhler, D. (2006). History and Historiography of Education: Some remarks on the utility of historical knowledge in the age of efficiency. Encounters/Encuentros/Rencontres on Education. https://doi.org/10.15572/ENCO2006.01 Z. A. Szabó, I. Garai & A. Németh (2022) The history of education in Hungary from the mid-nineteenth century to present day, Paedagogica Historica, 58:6, 901-919, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2022.2090849