Hungary

Last update: March, 2025

Art education belongs to the Ministry of Interior. There is a state secretariat for Public Education and another one for Tertiary Education.

In public education, the arts have traditionally had important position in Hungary. Literature – called simply as “Hungarian” – is taught in a relatively high number of weekly hours, thanks to the role that mother-tongue literature played in the historical process of constructing national identity. The strong personal influence of Zoltán Kodály, composer and reformer of music education, resulted in the 1950s in frequent singing classes in the lower grades, which still prevails.  The predominance (75 percent) of folk songs in elementary music education is also a Hungarian speciality.

Teaching art and music in Hungary is available at elementary, secondary, and tertiary level schools. At the secondary level there are 47 schools. Higher level professional art education and training have a long-standing tradition: the University of Fine Arts was established in 1871, and the Franz Liszt University of Music, one of the most prestigious music universities around the world, was founded in 1875 (with the personal involvement of Liszt).

Last update: March, 2025

The main change over the last five years has been the introduction of the new national curriculum in 2020. The curriculum defines key competences, development fields and educational objectives. It states that art education is particularly concerned with the development of creativity, self-expression and cultural awareness and plays a significant role in the development of other competences. The new national curriculum was criticised by art historians because art history as a separate subject was removed and merged it into more modern visual culture education.

Table 5:    Required amounts of lessons per education fields, National Curricula in 2020

*Either one of the three.
A minimum of two weekly "Singing and music" lessons and one "Drawing" lesson are included in the curriculum of primary and secondary schools.

Basic art schools

Institutions of basic education in art and music are accessible and free of charge all over the country. However, there is a selective entry process, especially in the case of music, due to over-subscription. Education fields are the following: visual arts and crafts, theatre and puppet theatre, dance, music. Within music: classical, folk, jazz and electro-acoustic.

Table 6:         Number of pupils and pupils/teacher ratio in basic art schools in 2020

Source: https://dari.oktatas.hu/kozerdeku_index

Last update: March, 2025

Both the number and share of art students is around 3 percent in Hungarian tertiary education. However, the share of state-funded places is decreasing (as in all of higher education). Women are overrepresented among art students.

Table 7:         Number of art art students, 2021-2024

Source: Central Statistical Office

At BA level, students could choose from 19 higher educational programmes, while at MA level, 45 are available. These include 8 educational programmes – e.g., acting and painting – that stayed in their old one-tier system apart from the majority within the Bologna system

The latest development were presented in Chapter 2.1: three out of the five art universities have been transformed into nominally autonomous “public interest foundations”:

• Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
• Hungarian Dance University
• University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE)

The University of Fine Arts and the Franz Liszt University of Music remained state institutions.

Last update: March, 2025

One of the functions of the extensive network of the houses of culture is running training courses in various art forms. Participating in various amateur art groups involves continuous training done by professionals.

Last update: March, 2025

In 2015, a nonprofit limited company was founded with the aim to run a Writer Academy and related activities, subsidised in the next two years with altogether 1,950,000 HUF. The project has since launched and published over a hundred young writers.