Educational Activities of Slovak Teachers – National Revivalists – in the Territory of Present-Day Hungary in the 18th – 19th Centuries

The end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, which was a period of a rising crisis of feudalism in Hungary, was also a period of mass migration of Slovaks from north to south, to me so-called Lower Country, where after the departure of the Turks the land was devastated and for its cultivation the nobility offered the im m im nts certain economic advantages and an ideologically more tolerant environment — religious freedom. In the period of the Counter- Reformation, in the first phase of the Lower Country’s colonization, the bulk of Slovak immigrants was formed by Protestant peasants, who founded Slovak schools ot their own in their new places of work. The immigrants also included Slovak teachers who followed the example of S. Tešedík, a Slovak educationist, enlightener, philanthropist, founder of the Industrial- Agricultural Educational Institute at Sarvaš, in the Békéš district, the first of its kind not only in Hungary but in the whole of Europe, in whicn the didactic principles of Comenius were put into practice. Following his example, they taught the people better husbandry, founded school plots, taught how to cultivate new crops, grow, gran and look after new kinds or fniit trees. They wrote Slovak works to educate the people, textbooks, readers, popular educational works, didactic verses, short stories, fables. They were often highly educated, erudite men, returning from' university studies abroad, belonging to enlightened men, neo-humanists, philanthropists as well as to the anti-feudal-minded Hungarian Jacobins, who sympathized with the ideas of the French Revolution.
In the early 19th century they founded teachers’ associations which were among the first in Hungary.
In the period of tough Magyarization the Slovak teachers in the Lower Country fearlessly opposed it, supported Slovak grammar scnools under their patronage in Slovakia and the Slovak Patriotic Union. The results of their work lived on in many Slovak Lower Country generations, which have preserved their Slovak national consciousness for almost three centuries.