Title: How Computers Entered the Classroom in Hungary: A Long Journey from the Late 1950s into the 1980s
Abstract: Computers arrived in Hungary only by the end of the 1950s. During the 1960s, Hungary tried to implement several (mostly unsuccessful) reforms in the fields of education, economics, and even politics. However, the customary proliferation of bureaucracy was not fostering actual change. The strenuous efforts of the Hungarian "IT sector" in the field of education bore fruit only during the 1970s. Our paper focuses on the two decades of the 1960s and 1970s while providing a short summary of the 1950s as a background for these processes, and a short section about the spreading of personal computer culture and its use in education in the 1980s. We discuss computer education on multiple levels, from secondary schools to universities, including cybernetics and computer clubs, as well as vocational education. Discourse around the growing delay behind developed Western countries heightened as schools lagged behind in technological development more and more. Beyond the bureaucratic and ideological aspects, we also discuss the debates internal to the profession.