
The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015) - jpelecanos
https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2015/01/10/the-hungarian-approach-and-how-it-fits-the-american-educational-landscape/
======
loriverkutya
As a hungarian, I'm pretty surprised by this article, since the quality of
hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which
basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level. And
however in the past, math education was world class, now the "old school"
teachers are retiring and other than a handful of elite schools (Fazekas,
Eötvös, Radnóti etc) most of the schools are way below the european average.

(source:
[https://www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa/country/hun](https://www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa/country/hun)
)

Also usually only one or two hungarian university manage to get to any of the
"best 500 universities in the world" list.

~~~
baxtr
> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks
> to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on
> education on all level

I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education.
Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you
could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust
those lists, since they “feel” quite mechanistic.

~~~
kbart
I'm not the OP, but I'm from another Eastern Europe country where education
level falls fast and dramatically. Few key indicators of that:

0\. I was attending an elite gymnasium and we deliberately used old "hard
science" (math, physics, chemistry) textbooks from 70'-80', because they were
_much_ more advance level than modern ones. Most of math/physics taught during
first/second year at university now, was taught in 11-12th grade back then.

1\. Anecdotally, but _all_ teachers complain that every year students are
getting less motivated, performing poorer, having shorter attention spans.
With local "no children left behind" equivalent it's enough just to attend
some percentage of classes to get passable grades.

2\. Every few years some kind of "reform" is performed to reduce the
difficulty of final exams to maintain failure rates at bay and keep statistics
nice.

3\. Combined points 1 with 2 this leads to universities full of students that
have neither motivation nor skills to perform there. Since such students make
up majority in most less popular programs, the difficulty level is also
reduced to adapt.

4\. Degrading higher level education quality reflects on its prestige as
potential employees no longer trust universities to produce prospective
candidates. This closes the loop back to point 1 as current pupils deem
education "worthless".

5\. Fun fact: entrance exams to non-prestigious universities from 70'-80' were
(maybe still are) widely used as assignments in national level competitions
when I was at school (late nineties to early 00'). To paraphrase that -- a
skill level that once was expected from _anybody_ who wanted to be accepted in
university now puts you at the very top.

~~~
naasking
> Anecdotally, but all teachers complain that every year students are getting
> less motivated, performing poorer, having shorter attention spans.

Most of these points smack of rosy retrospective bias. Kids have great
attention spans if content is delivered to them in a way they can engage in,
for instance, interactive computer games. Teachers are just out of touch with
kids, and really they always have been. It's why kids almost always like
younger teachers more.

~~~
Viliam1234
> Most of these points smack of rosy retrospective bias.

Well, accusations of bias can go both ways. Maybe it feels bad to admit that
there is a serious problem with no obvious solution in sight; and pretending
that we don't see anything is how we bury our collective heads in the sand.

Instead of accusing each other of biases, let's discuss evidence. As was
mentioned in a few comments in this thread, high-school textbooks in multiple
countries are gradually dumbed down, so much that 20 or more years old
textbooks are now considered a material for gifted kids. (I can confirm this.)
Your turn.

> Kids have great attention spans if content is delivered to them in a way
> they can engage in, for instance, interactive computer games.

If the only problem is that humans are losing the ability to learn without
playing computer games, perhaps we could fix it by making all the necessary
games. But we better start making them really fast, because there is a lot of
knowledge to cover.

And while we are at this type of solution, we could also fix problems with
nutrition by genetically engineering a broccoli that will taste like heroin.
Situation is not that bad if kids are still willing to pay attention to
addictive things.

~~~
naasking
> As was mentioned in a few comments in this thread, high-school textbooks in
> multiple countries are gradually dumbed down, so much that 20 or more years
> old textbooks are now considered a material for gifted kids. (I can confirm
> this.) Your turn.

And what do you think that proves exactly? Did you prove that the kids using
the old textbooks actually absorbed the more advanced material? Did you prove
that outcomes using the old material are better than with the new material?

Perhaps the new textbooks simply distilled the relevant material that the vast
majority of kids actually grasp, without all the unnecessary detail that was
just skipped over. I can think of plenty of different scenarios to explain the
evidence that's been listed here, and only one of those explanations are
"dumber kids and/or dumbed down education".

The exact same arguments have been trotted out about the dumbing down of
liberal college education, where in the 1900s, every college degree meant
exposure to poetry, art, history, philosophy and more. Modern college
education is then portrayed as poor substitute, completely ignoring the fact
that our body of knowledge is at least 10,000x larger than it was in the
1900s, and a direct comparison is frankly laughable.

> If the only problem is that humans are losing the ability to learn without
> playing computer games, perhaps we could fix it by making all the necessary
> games.

Talk about missing the point. As evidenced by my use of "for instance", that
was merely an example. Even among adults, interactive systems are clearly more
engaging, and given the environmental factors that shape modern kids, you
obviously are already too old to grasp their thinking process if you can't
understand that different environmental factors entails different learning
processes.

Which just proves my point that adults are and always will be out of touch
with the kids of their day.

~~~
kbart
_" And what do you think that proves exactly? Did you prove that the kids
using the old textbooks actually absorbed the more advanced material?"_

Well, yes, at least some pupils did. See my comment about degrading exams
difficulty and problems in contemporary national competitions. Math problems
are fundamental, so it's a good indicator of skills, despite changing times.
Science _is_ boring at most times, you can't gamify everything.

------
leni536
I would like to point out two of my favorite high school competitions in
Hungary.

One is KöMaL [1]. It's a monthly journal, one has to send back solutions to
the problems. The competition is during the whole school year. It has problems
from math, physics and computer science, these are separate contests. I did
the "P" (theoretical physics) competition. Sometimes I took a look for the "B"
math problems and I could never solve a single "A" math problem, those are
freaking insane.

[1]
[https://www.komal.hu/info/miazakomal.e.shtml](https://www.komal.hu/info/miazakomal.e.shtml)

The second competition is the Eötvös Physics Competition [2]. Unfortunately
the problems are not translated to English. This is a single round competition
for the whole country. There are three physics problems fitting on a piece of
A4 paper (single sided). The students can use anything (any number of books,
calculator), the competition is 5 hours long. All high school and first year
university students participate in the same contest. It's designed to filter
out the very best physics students in the whole country (typically only one or
two students can fully solve all three problems).

[2]
[http://eik.bme.hu/~vanko/fizika/eotvos.htm](http://eik.bme.hu/~vanko/fizika/eotvos.htm)

~~~
ptero
Russia (Soviet Union actually) had somewhat similar mail in programs that IMO
we're very useful to stimulate those with high interest in specific fields
beyond what a school would do.

IMO stimulating and developing top end is something sorely missing in US
education, which is mostly focusing on helping those behind to catch up. That
is useful, but pushing 1-2% of best students as far as possible is just as
important for the society long term. My 2c.

~~~
digi_owl
And mail in may be better than extra classes or similar, as it may avoid
various "tall poppy" issues.

And these days it can even be done electronically.

------
niftich
I took my first eight years of math in Hungary; admittedly, some time ago.
Though I'm not sure if things have changed since then, or were different at
higher levels, the way the article describes it very much reflected my
experience. Starting out, there was a balanced mix of rote learning the basics
(as it was done in other subjects), then moving towards creativity and
gradual, independent rediscovery, and it was done so in a way that didn't feel
stifling if you somehow knew to do it a different way.

Ultimately it's a small country; there was a math bee you could compete in at
a local level, and then your district would send the best representatives to
the countrywide event. It was a prestigious event, and pretty stressful, but
ultimately fun. The questions asked at the national competition were always
really oddball and obscure and required both creativity and judicious use of
everything you've learned.

Come think of it, the culture of the competitions in various subjects made
school really fun.

Some other aspects of my primary school education in Hungary were not so
stellar. In other subjects, there was very much a focus on facts in isolation,
without really understanding or delving into context, notably in History.
Literature I also found limiting, as much emphasis was placed on poetry
analysis, which I found to be subjective; nonetheless, diverging from commonly
accepted analyses was did not result in a good mark. When I came to the US, I
found an emphasis on critical thinking in the Humanities, which was a breath
of fresh air.

But in math and science, the quality and method of instruction in Hungary was
top-notch.

~~~
koube
Why is Hungarian math so forward looking but not the other subjects? Is
Hungary especially good at math?

~~~
patkai
This question is not just worth understanding in itself but it would be
essential to ask at many levels, as science education is becoming the key to
the survival of humanity. As a Hungarian who left the country 20 years ago I
have been fascinated by this surprising success of the country, partly because
I did not personally get a good science education there. Actually, it was very
unbalanced, with most of it barely mediocre, while some of it absolutely
brilliant. The successful people came from 2-3 high schools (or "gymnasiums",
for ages 12-18) in Budapest in the beginning of the 20th century, and whatever
success Hungary had in the natural sciences was mostly a result of the work
and heritage of that generation. There is a very good description of this in
Norman MacRae's book on John von Neumann, worth reading.

A quick summary of the "reasons":

1\. Boom: at that time (from 1867 till WWI) Budapest was booming, more
attractive to immigrants than New York. Actually, most of the city you can see
today was built in those times.

2\. Culture: as a result of the boom and the wave of immigrants it became a
very liberal and open minded place (though this did not apply to the feudal
class at all - their kids typically became soldiers or playboys)

3\. Motivation: in a feudal society studying and intellectual eminence was the
way to go unless you were born an aristocrat. Parents, students, teachers were
willing to put time and money necessary to make their kids excel. This may not
sound unusual with all those helicopter parents you see nowadays, but actually
this was huge. Imagine growing up in a family where you knew - and your whole
family knew - that your only chance of making it is to be the best at math
your abilities allow.

4\. Education: I don't know where to start, so I can only give examples.
Imagine you are a 12 year old child and your teacher borrows you his favourite
papers on quantum physics and asks your opinion on them. Then you give a smart
comment and your teacher contacts the relevant professor at the university to
have a tea with you at your house next Sunday.

5\. Language: most of these kids learned Latin and Greek, and in before their
teenage years also spoke at least German fluently.

6\. The "marble table": Stanislaw Ulam (in his autobiography, another amazing
read) and also MacRae tells about the most important ingredient, the marble
table at the café (the easy-to-erase whiteboard of the time). In Central
Europe mathematicians met at cafeterias, discussed all day (often meaning 12
hour days at a cafe!), challenged each other, and did rarely work in
isolation, not worrying too much about "who thought of it first". They happily
took young kids in, 15 year olds sipping juice and 50 year old Banach drinking
something much stronger (may not have been Banach, but you'll read the book!).
It was such a well-known "way of doing math" that the IAS in Princeton was
officially established to re-create this culture and pull the typical American
professors out of their ivory towers.

It is an elitist system, I know, and does not solve mass education challenges.
But this small elite circle had an impact on almost everyone in the country's
education system. Even if you weren't a Wigner, Teller or Neumann, you spent 6
years in this environment and possibly became a great teacher, similar to the
one who taught half of these people, the great László Rácz [1] and taught in
this fashion.

Also, a similar great science education happened in Japan at some point (50's,
I think ), but I only read this as a side note in the book on Neumann. Anyway,
it is possible to do this again and with two small kids I'm very interested to
know how.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_R%C3%A1tz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_R%C3%A1tz)

~~~
pliny
>Anyway, it is possible to do this again and with two small kids I'm very
interested to know how.

Here's a context-relevant place to start:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-
gen...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/)

~~~
mncharity
I wonder if the review is missing some aspects of "concentrate on one
subject"?

On one subject, a mentor can be a master, and master instructor. And such
instruction is crucial for developing deep expert understanding. But in the
future, with better content, and improved learning infrastructure, one might
imagine these becoming available for more than one subject.

Both the concentration on one subject, and that subject being chess,
contribute to the effort having nice properties. Like non-superficiality. An
integrated and deeply organized body of knowledge and skills. Developing
transferable knowledge (within the subject at least), rich feedback, and
reflective building of mastery. But it's the properties that matter. Chess, or
another one subject, might be taught in a way that fails to have the nice
properties. And as learning infrastructure improves, the nice properties may
become available without the "one subject" or "and it's chess" restrictions.

There's a long history of exceptional masters teaching their field/craft to
their children from a young age, who in turn become exceptional masters. The
challenge is to scale that.

The straightforward "a gaggle of masters in everyone's pocket" is AI-complete
implausible. But the art of the next decade is crafting human-computation
hybrid systems. Things like eye tracking, and big data, provide opportunities
that no master mentor has ever had. We just need to get around to building on
them.

------
gizmo686
I would to see this approach applied more in the sciences as well.

I my college syntax (linguistics) class, most of the teaching was done by the
teacher giving us a (carefully curated) set of data to explain as homework.

Class time was spent making sure everyone got to the same answer and
understood the arguments behind it. When there are multiple reasonable
answers, they also made sure that students understand the other ones and why
we rejected them (sometimes the reason is as simple as 'we need to pick an
answer, lets just vote'; other times it is 'both are reasonable explanations,
the field went with B, read Chomsky 1987 if you want to know why.'). We would
then generally talk about problems we still have (especially if the data was
English, and students could come up with new data that didn't work as nicely).

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Class time was spent making sure everyone got to the same answer and
understood the arguments behind it."_

How many students were in your class?

With the typical undergraduate class sizes that I've TA'ed at (about 30
students or so), there's just not enough time during the class to go over
everything with each person individually and explain everything to them if
they don't get it. Even if there was time, if someone is slow the rest of the
class will be bored to death waiting for you to explain something to them
(possibly over and over until they get it). Some of the more advanced students
will be bored by any explanation, while the most detailed explanations with
many examples are necessary for other students.

There are office hours and lab time, and some students make the most of that,
but some don't. I actually spent a lot of my time helping out students who
were lagging behind and needed a lot of attention, and wound up kind of
neglecting the talented ones who didn't need any help, but who I think would
have gotten more out of the class if we were able to engage them more,
challenge them more, and cater to their interests more rather than trying to
cater to the lowest common denominator.

I'm not sure what the right answer here is in classes where students vary
widely in skills, interests, and abilities.

~~~
gizmo686
25\. It also does not typically require much individual attention; generally
presenting a cleaned up version of the arguement is enough. If multiple
students have a problem, they tend to have the same problem, so the work
scales sublinearly. Of course, larger class sizes will always make teaching
more difficult.

------
maksimum
> After the student investigation, the teacher highlights important ideas
> embedded in a concrete problem, and summarizes and generalizes their
> findings. In particular, the teacher’s summary makes sense and is
> meaningful, because students have had the experience of playing around with
> these ideas on their own before coming together to formalize them as a
> class.

It's important for students to get their hands on examples and play with the
ideas we're trying to present on their own. One issue I have is that this
takes so much time. If you're introducing concepts that the students don't
have good intuition about, you have to go so slowly. Even then it feels like
some students can't follow.

I think it's beneficial when it's possible to get students to engage with the
material on a daily basis as reading or homework. Hard to do when they're
expected to take 4 classes (college) or 6-8 (high school) and dedicate study
time to each of them.

~~~
gizmo686
When you use this approach, you generally cover less material, but cover it
better. For most classes, this seems like a good tradeoff.

4 classes isn't really that much. You can essentially replace the time
students would normally spend "studying" with them spending that time working
on the problems. Further, in my experience, this type of work is far more
engaging than traditional studying, so it is easier for students to spend time
on it; and the time they do spend tends to be more thoughtfull.

~~~
jacobolus
Moreover, as people practice, they can get generically better at meta-skills
such as (in no particular order) skimming, close reading, constructing mental
outlines of arguments, drawing diagrams and pictures, inventing examples to
match given specifications, testing concrete examples against abstract
statements, generalizing specific relationships discovered in the examples to
abstract laws and proving them generically, discarding or modifying
abstractions to better match a wider collection of examples, working
backwards, discarding dead-end problem-solving strategies while mining them
for partial useful results, breaking problems down into manageable pieces,
deductive logic, generating hypotheses likely to be interesting, abandoning
whole problems which turn out to be too hard and switching to something else,
cross-applying solution strategies from one field to another, simplifying
complex arguments by discarding or separating extraneous or duplicated steps,
writing up explanations in clear and coherent way for various audiences,
researching past work in an efficient way, diving into new fields with
completely alien notation and terminology and quickly taking the lay of the
land, and so on.

These skills are more generically useful than recipes or collections of facts
about any particular subject, because they serve as multipliers for quite
generic learning and problem-solving efficiency.

One big problem with trying to teach a single specific course in a very
problem-centered / student-driven / socratic style is that often students have
not been sufficiently trained in any of these meta skills, and as a result
move at much slower pace than their potential because they waste a lot of time
on inefficient problem-solving methods, get side-tracked, throw away useful
work, explain things poorly, don’t get around to crystallizing their useful
results, and so on. The more courses get taught in this style, the faster each
subsequent course can move as students figure out how to learn effectively.

~~~
katdev
That's a nice list of meta-skills. Do you have any further reading to
recommend on identifying/teaching meta-skills?

~~~
jacobolus
You could try Polya’s _How to Solve It_ , and follow up with Schoenfeld’s
_Mathematical Problem Solving_ (which cites a lot of other material). These
are rather focused on problem solving per se, and don’t really discuss larger-
scale strategies for research or learning. You can try just diving into child
development and education literature. Not sure what out there really tries to
be comprehensive in summarizing the best techniques for teaching and learning
arbitrary meta-skills.

------
jonsen
Math is much more than what I was taught in school. I discovered that as a
child when stumbling upon this Hungarian math book at the local library:

[https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Infinity-Dover-Books-
Mathemat...](https://www.amazon.com/Playing-Infinity-Dover-Books-Mathematics-
ebook/dp/B00A73IWVY/)

~~~
fogetti
Hey, that looks awesome! Thanks for recommending it. I put it on my bucket
list.

------
chx
Let's make this very clear: this is _not_ a typical Hungarian approach. This
is what Fazekas and to an extent a few more similar specialized high schools
do. The typical Hungarian approach is frontal instruction with no respect to
the learning speed differences.

Source: Personal experience. I am a Fazekas alumni and have a Hungarian maths
teachers masters as well. I am bankrolling a very small reform school in
Hungary so I am in contact with current Hungarian teachers every day and also
I am obviously very interested in what's going on so I read a lot.

------
karllager
A friend of mine enjoyed her first years in school in the Pannonian basin; I
am not sure, whether they did something special - but it was enough to get her
into a selective German high-school specialised in maths and sciences later in
her life. Always admired her for the experience, as she repeatedly speak of it
if it has been fun and games.

------
chatmasta
My high school did something similar [0]. We never had math textbooks, only a
book of problems. Each night we had 10 problems we had to solve. When we
showed up in class the next day, each student would present a problem on the
board and discuss their solution.

It worked well for the really disciplined, rigorous kids who were super
interested in math and already had a solid background in it. But for someone
like me, who never quite did all the homework, it became a game of getting to
class first so I could present the one problem I did last night.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_table)

------
otakucode
There were 2 documentaries produced by famed documentarian Frederick Wiseman
called High School and High School 2. In one, a group of average students are
followed through a typical high school in a middle class predominantly white
area. In the second one, a group of students are followed through an
experimental high school in a predominantly impoverished area with mostly a
Latino population. The 'experimental' nature of the school was that every
single class, every last one, was completely restructured to center around one
thing: critical thinking. Teaching by fiat ('this is how it is because I say
so and I am the authority') was banned. Every bit of teaching was through
asking questions and having them answered, students challenging teachers on an
equal intellectual playing field (unequal in specific knowledge of course, but
equal in capacity to reason and challenge assumptions).

The experimental school produced the highest proportion of students to go on
to receive college degrees (not just attend college, but finish) every seen in
the country. The results were absolutely amazing and tremendously good. But...
it's harder for teachers to teach that way. They can't plan ahead. They have
to know their subjects inside and out, not just read off of a lesson plan. If
a student asks a question that the teacher can't answer, the teacher has to
admit it and try to figure it out with them, which many teachers are not
emotionally mature enough to participate in alongside an adolescent. It gives
a great deal of power and agency to adolescents, and our society is obsessed
with stripping adolescents of every iota of control over their own life and
denigrating them as much as possible. So widespread adoption of such schooling
cannot gain much support at all.

The documentaries also did a good job showing how the "traditional" schooling
methods broke the 'spirit' of adolescents and sucked the love of learning and
figuring things out right out of them, turning them into disinterested husks
of human beings, while the experimental school left them as vibrantly full of
a love of life and learning as they entered it. Such things are of course
difficult to measure and generally distrusted by our "pleasure is a sure sign
of hidden dangers" mentality.

------
AJRF
I'm not "bad" at math per se, but would there be much benefit in going from
the ground up learning in the Hungarian form?

I guess you could blow through the first 7~10 years of schooling in less than
a year of dedicated study, but teaching yourself just up to before college
level would take you a few years, right?

Is there any online courses that have this content?

~~~
patkai
Reading George Polya's books might be a way of learning this technique. At
least they explain very well the method of thinking about math.

------
tioga
I grew up and studied math in Hungary and graduated from Fazekas, the school
mentioned in the atricle, and its "special math" high school class. I also
spent a year in high school in the US so I have some basis for comparison.

My experience was pretty much exactly as described in the article as well and
I am forever grateful for the school and my teachers for giving me a
foundation I could build on later in life. I'd like to point out a few things
though, others have already touched upon some of these:

First, similar to why it's hard to replicate the Silicon Valley startup model
elsewhere (or at least why it takes such a long time), the issue is somewhat
similar here. The method of teaching is just one part of the equation. It was
a whole "ecosystem" of fantastically knowledgable and respected teachers who
could anywhere else be university professors or researchers, publications
(such as KoMaL), camps, competitions and other extracurricular activities
aimed at elementary and high school students, and a culture of math and
science being interesting and fun vs. the stereotypical hard and boring.

The way of teaching feels a little bit more of a consequence of this culture
rather than the source. You can pick your own preferred origin story for how
that culture emerged: a booming industrial economy in the age of the Austro-
Hungarian empire, a multi-ethnic, liberal (in the original sense of the word
and given the context) country, the migration and resulting concentration of
Jews in Budapest, or a series of exceptional teachers and mentors. The highly
visible world-wide successes in the first half of the 20th century then later
provided an on-going narrative that benefited the national ethos and hence
made plenty of funding available in the second half (conveniently forgetting
the austro-hungarian, the economic boom, the liberal or the jewish part of the
story). But in any case the culture and the support system is (or at least
was) there and that one is very hard to replicate at a broad scale, although
certainly easier within specific communities. As someone mentioned, even in
Hungary it is not broadly present and is limited to a certain set of top
schools.

Also, there is a flip side to this story. Personally, I really liked math
before going to high school and completely lost interest by the time I
finished. Partly because a lot of kids around me were much better so I felt
like a failure, partly because I was more interested in computers and
programming and also in finance, all of which was looked down upon. The
prestige of winning a programming competition was nowhere near the same as
placing well in math or physics. Working as a developer on the side was
considered a distraction. I think this was for the better for me personally. A
decent number of my classmates got burnt out and had severe depressions due to
the pressure. You were almost expected to win a gold medal at the
International Olympiad and eventually become a world-wide math celebrity. I
can't shake the feeling that a lot of them "peaked" at the end of high school,
although perhaps that's partly the result of the rapidly declining university
system.

Again, I'm very grateful for what I got but it's more in terms creative
thinking and problem solving than specific math skills. In fact, I got to
learn other subjects, such as history and literature through the same method
which I now realize is very unusual in a country where those subjects are
usually heavily biased toward insitilling a national identity as opposed to
fostering independent thinking.

------
kvch_
For some reason I never knew that Hungarian Maths teaching is so outstanding.
My high school teacher who came from Romania to Hungary always told us that he
learned topics much earlier than we did. For example he learned equitations in
grade 5 and we learn them in grade 7. So I figured that Romania must be better
at teaching Maths.

Having gone through all levels of Maths in Hungary, from elementary school
until BSc of university, I want to point out that this method sounds good as
long as the teacher is able to keep the attention of the class. In my school,
a few teachers were unable to do that and it was a disaster. Children were
playing, talking and doing nothing in classes. Even preventing others from
learning the material. Fortunately, I have never had these kind of teachers.
However, if someone did they were doomed at university, because the
expectations were too high for them. So I think it is quite a big disadvantage
in Hungary. If you miss out in high school, because you were busy being a
rebellious teen, there is a good chance that you never make it. You only
realize it after you started university, because it is pretty easy to get into
science courses of top universities in Hungary and very hard to actually
graduate.

