Gá­bor Hush­e­gyi: Multi-Lingual Edu­ca­tion and the Bolog­nese Process

The Unit­ed Euro­pean Higher-Education Area and Lock­ing up to the Nation­al Lan­guage – the Alter­na­tives of Multi-Lingual (high­er)-e­d­u­ca­tion in Slo­va­kia

The unit­ed Euro­pean high­er-e­d­u­ca­tion area insti­tutes the co-­op­er­a­tion of uni­ver­si­ties, coll­eges of the con­ti­nen­t. The oppor­tu­ni­ties given by the Bologne process are recent­ly hin­dered not only by admin­is­tra­tive and nation­al legal obsta­cles, but also by the lack of for­eign lan­guage, and/or tech­ni­cal ter­mi­nol­o­gy of stu­dents and uni­ver­si­ty teach­er­s. Those pres­ent Slo­vak­s, who ben­e­fit from this new sys­tem are main­ly the for­mer stu­dents of bilin­gual or for­eign lan­guage sec­ond­ary school­s, who dur­ing their uni­ver­si­ty stud­ies, after learn­ing tech­ni­cal ter­mi­nol­o­gy com­pe­ten­cy, are suc­cess­ful in meet­ing the com­pe­ti­tion require­ments of inter­na­tion­al stu­dent mobil­i­ties. Their class­mates and te­am mem­bers strug­gle with for­eign lan­guage com­pe­ten­cies in order to pass the lan­guage exam suc­cess­ful­ly that is essen­tial for the dip­lo­ma. It is evi­dent that uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ed in stan­dard high-­school edu­ca­tion, could take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ties given by the bolog­nese process in a lower num­ber, equal­i­ty of chances can be guar­an­teed only by enabling mul­ti-­lan­guage edu­ca­tion. From this point of view it is worth to apply Euro­pean-school pro­ject, that is the mul­ti-­lan­guage edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion of chil­dren of diplo­mats work­ing in the coun­tries of the EU, to think about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of real­is­ing this in Cen­tral Europe and Slo­va­ki­a, as well. At the same time, it is inevitable to think about the con­flict of pub­lic teach­ing in moth­er lan­guage and mul­ti- and/or for­eign lan­guage that is con­sid­ered to be irrec­on­cil­able, and about the con­se­quences of lock­ing up to the nation­al teach­ing lan­guage. In order to this we out­line the for­mer six decades of for­eign lan­guage teach­ing in (Czecho)slovakia, the changes after the sys­tem changes in Slo­va­ki­a, the new expec­ta­tion defined in the field of mul­ti- and for­eign lan­guage teach­ing, and the dif­fer­ent forms of real­i­sa­tion, as well. This way, we have come to the issue of the Euro­pean-school, and/or to the real­i­sa­tion of this mul­ti-­­cul­tur­al edu­ca­tion con­cep­tion at home, that is not hope­less and is not an ini­tia­tive with­out com­pe­ti­tion.