The Emergence of Natural Science Content in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Primary School Readers
The Emergence of Natural Science Content in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Primary School Readers

Summary/Abstract: This study examines the representation of scientific content in nineteenth-century Hungarian primary school readers. In this period, readers intended for the upper grades served both as tools for reading practice and for conveying knowledge and moral values. A comparative analysis of the structure of the German and Hungarian readers examined here indicates that natural science material constituted, on aver¬age, fifty percent of their content. This finding suggests that reading books for grades 5 and 6 played an important role in the teaching of the natural sciences in primary schools during this period. To understand this phenomenon, the study examines how the transfer of genre characteristics within the Central European educational space intersected with pedagogical demands arising from the contemporary educational infrastructure of Hungary, and how these dynamics influenced and were reflected in the thematic structure of the readers.

• Details
• Contents