The pedagogical career of Ferenc Ney (1814-1889)

Ferenc Ney (1814-1889) is remembered as an teacher: as one of the founders of early childhood education and the kindergarten system in Hungary, and in the second half of his life as the director of the Pest Real School - today's Eötvös József Gymnasium in Budapest.

It was during his time as a teacher that he had to create the most important operating conditions, administrative areas and institutions of a state in the process of becoming a bourgeois state, and even the Hungarian nation with its own modern language. Besides the few trained specialists, this creative work was mostly carried out by amateurs, obsessed workers and enthusiastic propagators who provided an immediate response to the need that had just been identified. This pre-professionalisation stage was characterised by restless haste and the use of individual solutions and combinations.

Ferenc Ney, although committed in spirit and ambition, was not a professional teacher, but a Hungarian patriot of the reform era, who worked in many areas of national development, experimenting as a playwright, novelist, poet, publicist, leading member of reform associations; who saw in all his tried and tested activities the search for "the salvation of the homeland". His genuine and persistent commitment to 'national education' would not have been compatible with his being 'just' a teacher, as the majority of teachers at the Real School were at the time; but it was precisely this understanding that enabled him to act as a school director, with remarkable success, as an 'educational politician', which did not yet exist in a way that could be defined at the time.