Ethnic Differences in Education in Hungary. Survey Report

the scope of anticipated differentiations by social status was reduced on purpose: the survey intended to explore how differences are shaped in education among young people from diverse ethnic backgrounds who live in each other’s proximity and who, by and large, share similar conditions in socio-economic terms. However, the research revealed that strong currents of institutional selection are at play, accentuating the differences within the community by establishing a high degree of concordance between students’ ethnic and social backgrounds. As a rule, young people from higher-status families from the majority study in better and more prestigious schools and classes than their peers from ethnic minority backgrounds whose relative social disadvantages are increased by often being confined to conditions that deprive them from acquiring even the basics of knowledge and skills that are necessary for later successful advancement in education and beyond. Whether selection by ethnicity is a spontaneously emerging outcome of “white flight”, or it is caused by early tracking or the setting up of classes with different curricula, or whether it follows from a deliberate school policy to segregate minority children into special units and classes, ethnic separation and segregation proved to impregnate all aspects of adolescents’ lives. Discussions in this study show that, by being concentrated into less favourable settings and arrangements, young people from ethnic minority backgrounds attain poorer school results, have less opportunities to advance on the secondary and higher levels, and face greater risks of dropping out than either of those of their same-ethnic peers who have been fortunate enough to escape segregation, or – even more – than their peers from the majority. At the same time, the harmful implications of segregation also manifest themselves in frequent occurrences of discrimination and broadly perceived injustices both within the walls of the schools and outside of them. However, the picture is not this bleak in all in its aspects. Despite all negative experiences, the school is a friendly place in the eyes of the great majority of young people, without distinctions. They usually find friends among their classmates and engage in a variety of activities that involve peers from different ethnic and social backgrounds. Likewise, they find teachers whom they trust and who support them – although the trustfulness of ethnic minority students certainly increases in schools where the staff is mixed by ethnic belonging. A positive way of relating to school is also reflected in longer-term aspirations. Ethnic minority adolescents do not differ from their peers from the majority in their dedication to the studying that most of them consider the sole firm path toward a prospering adulthood. Despite great departures in their actual prospects, the majority of adolescents across the prevailing social and ethnic boundaries that otherwise divide them trust themselves as well as their families and communities to gain enough inspiration and strength for progression toward a future living that is better than now and to attain a social standing that is based on fair recognition and genuine inclusion. However, the degree of success does not depend only on their efforts. Our survey results point toward important variations in the sharpness of ethnic inequalities and marginalisation that at closer scrutiny reveal the significance of the prevailing welfare arrangements and the substantial impact of historically forged routines in interethnic cohabitation in how larger-scale social relations allow for ethnically “blind” integration or continue to reproduce “minoritisation” and exclusion along ethnic lines.