Hungarian Children Boycott School in Education Protest

W460

Schools across Hungary were half-empty on Monday after parents kept their children at home as part of a growing revolt over the right-wing government's sweeping education reforms.

More than 34,000 people signed up to the protest on the Facebook page "I won't go to school", launched by 36-year-old mother Krisztina Puskas.

"This day is a way of drawing attention to the fact the education system has been deteriorating in recent years. Changes are needed," the woman from the southern city of Szeged told AFP on Monday.

The action comes two weeks after thousands joined a teacher's rally in the capital, Budapest, calling on the government to reverse its reforms. 

Since taking power in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has handed over many decision-making powers previously held by schools to a state-run agency and introduced a national curriculum. 

But teachers have long slammed the changes for taking place without their consensus. 

They say the reforms force them to spend too much time on administrative tasks and lead to shortages of basic supplies like pens and paper.

"My mother is teaching geography to 10-year-olds and the new textbooks she has to use are catastrophic: they are full of errors and contain hardly any maps," Budapest student Anna Huvos, 18, told AFP in a phone interview.

Huvos said only a handful of her classmates at the Mihaly Fazekas secondary school had gone to school on Monday.

Meanwhile, several institutions like the Miksa Roth museum in Budapest waived their entry fees and organized all-day activities for children skipping school.

The state education department told AFP the exact number of absentees would be released on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Orban's chief-of-staff Janos Lazar warned teachers against using children to "blackmail" the government, and urged them to attend talks rather than protests.

A teachers' trade union however said a new protest is already being organized for March 15.

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