In the first half of the 20th century, Hungary experienced territorial changes several times. After two decades of the Trianon treaty in 1920, the country regained some of its territories between 1938 and 1941. These territorial changes caused significant challenges in secondary teacher education from the perspective of extending the professional authority over secondary teacher candidates who began their professional socialisation in a foreign professional environment. In our paper, particular attention is devoted to the Hungarian teacher candidates who commenced their studies in Czechoslovakia but continued in Budapest after 1938. The aim of the presentation is twofold. The first is to reveal the perception of the Czechoslovakian professional training by the Hungarian professional institutions. The second is to unveil the attitude of the Hungarian professional institutions towards teacher candidates with Hungarian ethnical backgrounds who socialised outside the territory of Hungary. The proposed historical phenomena are investigated within the theoretical frames of the critical approach of professional theories. This theory outlines the monopolistic character of professional groups, which seems apt to interpret the history of intellectual professions in Central and Eastern Europe. To this theoretical frame, the ’system of professions’ conception by Andrew Abbott (1990) is also added to outline that the Hungarian professional authorities had to develop a principle of how to relate to professional institutions performing in the same field but in a foreign country. Furthermore, the theoretical notion of „deprofessionalization” is also incorporated in the explanation to highlight the subordinated position of Hungarian professionals to their regulating authority. Archival sources preserved in the National Archives of Hungary and the Archives of Eötvörs Loránd University, Budapest were processed. These sources entail the documentation of the Secondary Teacher Training Institution of Budapest as the professional institution responsible for secondary teacher training and the Ministry of Religion and Public Education as a government entity that regulated the professional training of secondary teachers. Document analysis of archival sources and secondary literature review were employed as primary methods of the investigation. Preliminary results suggest an idiosyncratic answer of the Hungarian professionals to the historical situation resulted in the territorial gains. Their Czechoslovakian counterparts were deemed as equal and legitimate professional partners who had the right to set standards for performing as secondary teachers in their field of monopoly. Therefore, all achievements of teacher candidates who began their studies beyond the borders of Hungary were recognised. However, these studies had to be supplemented with additional knowledge that made candidates fit to perform in the Hungarian education environment. Even though most of the candidates from Czechoslovakia had Hungarian backgrounds and were familiar with the Hungarian culture and language, from a professional point of view they were treated as „foreigners” who had to be acculturated to the Hungarian professional realities. This perception was in line with the agenda of the ministry, which exploited this unpreceded historical situation to strengthen further the control over the whole professional group. The ideological indoctrination of teacher candidates slung even further the whole secondary teacher profession on the deprofessionalization path.

Critique of bureaucracy is the most common reaction to the fact that administration matters for schooling, but if we understand school structures as the result of pedagogical and administrative actions, a comprehensive history of schooling that is sensitive to diversity should examine who gained access to the administration. Recent works (Geiss 2014; Geiss und Vincenti 2012) and the cultural turn in the history of bureaucracy (Becker 2003) support a more nuanced attention to specific administrative contexts and actions. We will turn our attention here to the lower and intermediate levels of school administration, which connect the ministerial administration with local school realities (Scholz 2012). Here the preconditions of schooling, that also structured inequalities and power relations are negotiated.

Our contribution focuses on the selection of Prussian school Inspectors. We will systematically analyze biographies of appointed officials in the more rural predominantly Polish-speaking district (Regierungsbezirk) of Posen, part of the eastern periphery of the Prussian state, during a period of significant changes in the organization of school administrative structures (1860-1900). We present a quantitative analysis of this case and compare it with the urbanized and mostly German-speaking western Prussian District of Düsseldorf, using a prosopographic data bank. We will also draw on the rich archival materials on appointments of several selected inspectors to reconstruct individual selection process(es) and selection criteria for the district of Posen.

Based on works on nationality and language policy (Klečacký 2022; Burger 1995, Łapot 2022) we reconstruct how marking of the group of Catholic, non-German-speaking Poles significantly increased the implementation of non-clerical full-time school supervision in the latter case. We can show, that the combination of different individual attributions was used in Posen to purge certain strata of the population from the administration and enabled the reduction of diversity of national and language backgrounds while meanwhile promoting a wider diversity of professional backgrounds within the ranks of the school administration. Catholic school inspectors were marked as not fit for office in both districts, but the region of Posen saw far greater replacements. The combination of several categorial attributes caused this quantitative difference between the two cases. In order to pursue aggressive nationalistic policies as a discriminatory power against Poles, the state first employed a practice of exclusion along specific categories of difference within the administration. We will situate this process within the Prussian Kulturkampf, the conflict between the state and the (Catholic) church (Lamberti 1986).

Our outlook discusses systematically the relevance and possible implications of the selection of personnel on administrative practices and focus also on literature produced by the appointed inspectors. We also discuss whether nuances in state policies of nationalization, combining state interests regarding nationalization, secularization, and language policy can be identified as a possible type of imperialistic school administration policy.

A word that meets newspaper readers daily and is on everyone's lips these days is >automation<. You can say that it has become something of a slogan that everyone talks about and behind which one glimpses vague notions of a future society - not too distant - where machines of various kinds do the work, while people's biggest concerns are how to use their free time. (TCO-Tidningen, 1956) The first and largest groups to be laid off due to computerized automation in Sweden are female office workers. This was already happening during the first half of the 1950s when computers made their way into insurance companies and banks. Despite this, there is no union struggle for them at this point, but instead massive debates and engagement about the future of jobs in industry (e.g., Rahm, 2021). A survey on the adaptation of different occupational groups, commissioned by Center for Business and Policy Studies [Studieförbundet Näringsliv och Samhälle] in 1955, which was deployed to examine both feelings of well-being in the workplace as well as suitability for positions, shows that male white-collar workers thrived best in their work, while their female colleagues experienced exclusion and alienation (Höök, 1955). This is explained by the fact that female white-collar workers had equally high demands on themselves as their male co-workers, but fewer opportunities for promotion than their male colleagues, and therefore felt left out. While the first two decades of digitization are centered around men in industry, during the 1970s massive educational campaigns started to strengthen digital competence, especially for women (e.g., Guerrero et al, 2023). This presentation therefore aims to investigate, explain, and understand how the debates about early digitization, from the perspective of civil servants, interact with notions of gender, class, and education. The material consists of the union member newspaper TCO Tidningen during the years 1950-1970.