Director: Dr. Bácskai Vera

OTKA T 037688

Based on the results of the history of education and urban history in Hungary, the purpose of the research is to analyse the social history of secondary education and the relation of the network of towns and the secondary school system in the first half of the 19^th century in Hungary. The objective is to define the role of education in the transformation of the urban network and the societies of particular towns during the period of the decomposition of the society of orders. The analysis is based on the statistical treatment of data from the register of students of the Pozsony and Kassa school districts. (The database would contain the data of about 20.000 students.) International contributions, first of all from sociology and pedagogy are mainly limited to the macro-level analysis of the significance of education from the point of view of social history, while contributions from urban history mainly consider the institutional aspects of issue. The research focusing on the relation of town and school opens up new perspectives in the domain of the social history of education, because on the one hand it examines thoroughly the extent to which different layers of urban population grasp the opportunities offered by secondary and higher education, on the other hand by investigating the composition of students from the point of view of origin, it can define the strength of attraction of the towns as centres of cultural gravitation.