Assessment of Art Education in Hungary: Historical Problems in Contemporary Perspective

Although art teachers are mostly unwilling to undertake assessment procedures or examinations, the history of art education suggests that even the earliest art programmes ended in rather rigid trials of draughtsmanship. A group of researchers including the author of this paper was commissioned to develop new methods for final examinations and, after surveying the existing methods and work done during the 1980s when art became one of the electives at the school-leaving examinations of the secondary grammar school, we were struck by the similarity between current tasks and solutions and 19th century works and models. Changing the methods of examinations in our case will certainly involve the reinterpretation of the academic heritage that at the same time elevates and cripples Hungarian art education at the secondary school level. This paper illustrates and interprets the philosophy of the examinations and art concourses from important periods of Hungarian educational history and outlines the passage of the Hungarian art teacher from the supposedly ‘eternal’ world of the Academia to the ‘banal’, ‘transitional’, ‘vulgar’ realms of contemporary visual communication.