“The new school textbooks have been completed, in line with the amended National Curriculum (NAT)”, it was announced at a press conference in Budapest on Wednesday.
State Secretary for public education Zoltán Maruzsa stated: “The textbooks have been completed within the appointed deadline, and are all available in PDF format on the tankonyvkatalogus.hu website. “The distribution of the textbooks to schools will begin in early August following their production, which is scheduled for June and July”, he added.
“In addition to being easy to use, a national commitment, child-centricity and 21st century modernity are all characteristic of the new school textbooks”, he emphasised.
Mr. Maruzsa recalled that in 2017 the government decided on amending the previous National Curriculum, which had been adopted in 2012. “Although the work may have been rather prolonged, it came to a successful close”, the State Secretary said, refereeing to the fact that the new NAT and framework curricula were published in January and February of this year, respectively.
He said it had taken a major effort to realise the reworking of school textbooks following the publication of the new curricula. According to the State Secretary, there are currently 2907 different publications in the list of textbooks for the school year beginning in September, but the number of textbooks that have had to be reworked is “much fewer”.
Mr. Maruzsa said it was also a most welcome development that the supply of school textbooks will become free to all schoolchildren from 1 September this year. The Education Office’s Deputy President for content development and the publication of textbooks Imre Sipos told reporters that of the 61 textbook development projects, 11 are totally new, while 50 of the newly published textbooks are revised versions of previous publications.
According to Mr. Sipos, 18 of these have been produced for first formers, 18 for fifth formers, 3 for seventh graders and 22 for students studying in eleventh grade. 39 of these are traditional textbooks, while 22 are selected texts, workbooks and other publications. The shortest textbook is 90 pages long, while the longest has 300 pages, he detailed.
During the course of the work, some 12 thousand pages were written, edited, typeset and proofread by professionals, with 130 experts taking part in the development of the new textbooks, including 100 authors, all of whom are employees of the Education Office, Mr. Sipos explained.
President of the Klebelsberg Institution Maintenance Centre Gabriella Hajnal spoke about the fact that certain textbooks have been totally modernised, while others have been revised, and will eventually also receive a full workover. “Every textbook author and editor (…) has performed an extremely important task over the past three months”, she said, thanking the authors for their efforts.
The authors and developers of the new textbooks also took part in the event, and presented the most important elements of the new books. In their assessment, the works follow general and international trends and are phenomenon-focused and practice-orientated, and in addition to mechanical knowledge the new textbooks also teach children to think and to develop their thinking, correspond to the target students’ ages, and present relationships between facts and subjects, while also reinforcing national identity.