„Arló” Roles and perspectives of the elementary school in solving the social problems of a disadvantaged settlement in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county

Abstract

Arló is situated about 3 kilometers south from the north hungarian industrial city, Ózd. As a cosequence of the political and economical changes in the early 90’s in Hungary, the settlement has a lots of social problems to resolve presently. The unemployment rate is very high in the village. The number and proportion of disadvantaged, mostly roma families, is growing quickly, so the poverty is a general phenomena in Arlo. As the number of poor families is growing in the village, the proportion of disadvantaged and problem students is raising int he school as well. To correlate with these there are lots of social and ethnical conflicts even between the roma and non-roma population or inside the roma community of the settlement. These problems hinder the social, cultural and economical development of the village.

As a member of a rural development research team of the Institute of World- and Regional Economics of the University of Miskolc, I started to examine the possibilities of the local primary school in resolving the problems mentioned above. This research was based on the following hypotesis: the primary school is not just a particular element of the local society, but it is a system with input and output factors. The input factors, like the local society, the parents, the children, the teachers, their identities, values and expectations, or the political and economical  system of the country affect every educational process and practice in the school. These processes and practises also have an affect on the achievements of the educational activities that I call output factors. The outputs, like the marks, competences and knowledges acquired by the pupils, or the further education rates affect the social, cultural and economical context of the school. It means that the school as a system has its possibilities to form, modulate and change its own millieu that is its own input factors. According to this hypotesis I assumed that the school can play an important part in the rural developement.  As a cultural anthropology student I had been using cultural anthropology methods (field work, participating observation, interwiews etc.) during the one-year-long research, in order to check wether my assumptions worked.