The diversification of the educational field in Hungary [antikvár]

PrefaceThere has been a rapid prolifération of non-formal educational programmes over the past few decades, radically altering the contours of the educational field. While the school remains the dominant educational institution in general, it is now by no means the only place where individuals pursue explicit training objectives. A whole range of other educational activities have developed outside of it and play a great variety of roles.Certain programmes, have emerged as a substitute for school éducation. Increasingly, though, non-formal éducation has come to be regarded as important for its own sake, with the growing awareness that the school is no longer capable of satisfying a vast range of increasingly diversified educational needs. This diversification of needs is the direct outcome of the rapid pace of economie, technological and social change in our contem-porary societies (requiring continuai adaptation on the part of ail social actors) and of a graduai broadening of development objectives (which need but go beyond increase of monetary income). In this context, more flexible, more individually-tailored forms of activities than the school can provide have become a necessity, whether these be vocational retraining courses, general éducation programmes, social and cultural activities, etc. Seen thus, non-formal éducation is no longer a simple corrective but plays a complementary role.It follows that the study of educational development and planning can no longer be confined to the fields that fall within the Ministry of Education's (or government ministries in general) sphere of competence. In ali countries there is a more or less developed network consisting of a multitude of diverse educational activities, which play different roles and maintain de facto relations of substitution, compétition, complementarity and even opposition among themselves. From an organizational viewpoint, however, this network of educational activities in no way constitutes a coherent system, firstly because there is no co-ordination among these different elements, and secondly because there is no overall vision of the directions in which the network as a whole might develop in the future.Thus the centrai question to which the Institute wishes to address itself is how educational planning, which was originally designed to forecast the expansion of, and organize the resources for, the school system, may be adapted to this diversification of the educational field and to the resulting