Arló : Az iskola szerepe és lehetőségei a társadalmi problémák kezelésében egy hátrányos helyzetű Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén megyei településen

Arló is situated about 3 kilometers south from the north Hungarian industrial city, Ózd. As a consequence of the political and economical changes in the early 90’s in Hungary, the settlement has many social problems to resolve presently. The unemployment rate is very high in the village. The number and proportion of disadvantaged, especially Roma families are growing quickly, so poverty is a general phenomena in Arló. As the number of poor families is growing in the village, the proportion of disadvantaged and students with problems is raising in the school as well. In connection with these, there are lots of social and ethnical conflicts even between the Roma and non-Roma population or inside the Roma community of the settlement. These problems hinder the social, cultural and economical development of the village. As a member of a rural development research team of the Institute of World and Regional Economics, University of Miskolc, I started to examine the possibilities of the local primary school in resolving the problems mentioned above. This research was based on the following hypothesis: the primary school is not just a particular element of the local society, but it is a system with input and output factors. Input factors like local society, parents, children, teachers, their identities, values and expectations, or the political and economical system of the country affect every educational process and practice in the school. These processes and practises also have an effect on the achievements of the educational activities that I call output factors. Outputs like marks, competences and knowledge acquired by the pupils, or the further education rates affect the social, cultural and economical context of the school. It means that the school as a system has its possibilities to form, modulate and change its own milieu that is its own input factors. According to this hypothesis, I assumed that the school can play an important part in the rural development. As a cultural anthropology student, I had been using cultural anthropology methods (field work, participating observation, interviews etc.) during the one-year-long research, in order to check whether my assumptions are true.