Educating the Hungarian Roma : Nongovernmental Organizations and Minority Rights

This book explores the actions and activities of Hungarian nongovernmental organizations to redress the failures of the education system with regard to the Roma and examines the barriers to reform.

This book is based on 18 months of ethnographic research with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that take the primary interventionist role in Roma education throughout Hungary. Through the use of ethnographic interviews, long-term participant observation and textual analysis of NGO websites, pamphlets, and promotional materials, Andria D. Timmer examines the nongovernmental sector as the locale in which the politicized “Gypsy identity” is constructed, interpreted, and contested. Many NGOs uphold the provider-beneficiary dichotomy, which blames failures on cultural or ethnic differences, rather than address the discrimination, racism, segregationist policies, and outright violence against the Roma. This policy has further exacerbated the residential isolation, discrimination, and manufactured sense of cultural differences that enables the continued practice of segregating Roma children into ethnically homogeneous schools or classrooms that commonly offer less quality education than that which their majority peers receive.