The National Pedagogy of Memory Programme

We established the programme in order to reach young people on an experience basis and to guide them as regards Hungarian history. Its aim is to strengthen national identity with the collaboration of places of remembrance and those active in public education. In its educational methodological focus, as well as the transmission of knowledge its avowed aim is to develop a national feeling, an emotional attachment to the homeland as well as the transmission of knowledge. It provides a point of reference to the discovery and understanding knowledge of the past, it creates the opportunity for active local study, for the building of school and class communities, for individual creativity and self-expression, and the evaluation and experience of the significance of historical events. By sparking interest, it provides the experience of involvement and the identification with heroes and role models, thereby strengthening national cohesion.

Its target age group is 12-18-year-olds, who study in any type of school within the framework of primary and vocational education, and those teachers who educate and teach in the unity of the transmission of values, experiences and knowledge, in a community-creating way, as well as those families who are the keepers and experiential passers-on of Hungarian consciousness. Our partners are the places of remembrance, the state and church public educational and vocational educational institutions, respectively their maintainers, and in the professional area the Professional Association of History Teachers, the experts of which are the developers of our active curriculum-processing framework programme applied for the memorials. We have links with many players of educational management, teacher training, educational professional organizations, talent nurturing and the civil sphere. We consider it important to disseminate the programme on the basis of the profound principle curriculum-processing methodology of the National Curriculum (NC) with the involvement of additional state resources to all such national and historical memorials that have a visitor reception capacity and active museum educational programme.

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Furthermore, the institution strives to encourage an ever-wider proportion of the general public to look for and visit the country’s memorial sites through the publication of the scientific information album entitled Terekbe írt múlt (Written In Spacies), booklets introducing national and historical monuments and the magazine entitled Emlékhelyek Lapja (Journal of Memorials) and the Emlék-Őr (Memory Guardian). In the framework of its historical and cultural memory education programme, the National Heritage Institute also intends to place memorial sites in the focus of attention of students and teachers working in public education, thus helping these sites to survive and to play an increasingly strong and conscious role in strengthening the national identity.