Patterns of press coverage of the people’s schoolteachers in the current political newspapers in 1921

Abstract

The study of press representation in the history of education has already had a considerable literature on the dualist period. However it can also be said that the exploration of the socialist (pedagogical) press continues to show new results. The press research of the Horthy era embedded in the educational history framework is a blind spot in the Hungarian educational history scene. As far as political and tabloid press is concerned, there is hardly any research activity, while written press was the communication channel of the period. The most important daily newspapers had a readership of several hundred thousand, and their power to shape public opinion is therefore undisputed. My research investigated the content of the political daily newspapers of the years between the two world wars, using qualitative and quantitative methodology on the subject of teachers in the vernacular schools. In order to ensure the validity of the study, the corpus consisted of political newspapers with different political orientations and significant readerships. Regarding qualitative methodology, thematic content analysis was preferred, while in the quantitative paradigm, descriptive statistics was used to search for publication patterns in the case of the institutions under study. The qualitative thematic content analysis and the enabling coding was carried out in both theory- and data-driven form, along the combined logic. By descriptive and interpretive processing of the data extracted from the corpus, we did not only capture the themes of the teachers represented, but also contextualised them using the literature framework. By integrating short press quotes about teachers into the core text, the spirit of the period under study can be evoked. Among the research questions, the present research article discusses the themes about teachers and visualises the patterns of theme choices in the three newspapers studied through quantification. Based on research, it can be clearly identified which topics concerning teachers have been thematised in the public discourse on elementary education in the studied newspapers, and the topic choices of the studied papers show a strong polarisation, based on the comparison of the papers with each other.