Capturing the classroom: disinformation as discursive reconstruction of education in Orbán’s Hungary

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Introduction: Debates on educational disinformation typically target false content in curricula or online. This study reconceptualizes the phenomenon as the discursive reconstruction of education’s purpose, the strategic redefinition of its values and social functions that becomes naturalized as common sense. Existing scholarship documents Hungary’s institutional capture but neglects the discursive mechanisms transforming political rhetoric into educational meaning. The study asks how Viktor Orbán’s speeches construct education’s societal role and how these representations become embedded in curricular content. Methods/Data: The primary corpus comprises Orbán’s official speeches (2022–2025) from the Hungarian government website; an education-keyword search yielded 110 speeches, from which 236 relevant segments were retained. Purposively sampled grade 5–12 textbooks (civics, history, literature) and selected 2015–2021 speeches provide illustrative, intertextual triangulation. Analytic Plan: The study applies Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis, examining discourse as text, discursive practice and social practice. Through iterative open and focused coding of speech segments, three discursive representations were derived inductively and analysed across all three dimensions. Results: Orbán constructs education through three interlocking representations: national preservation (schools as guardians of Christian-national identity), economic engine (vocational training as sovereignty), and ideological resistance (schools as fortresses against liberal ‘contamination’). Together they achieve hegemonic closure, rendering pluralism unthinkable; textbook content materializes this rhetoric as pedagogical fact. Conclusion/Implications: Educational disinformation operates through meaning reconstruction, ‘epistemic engineering’, not only factual falsehood, making fact-checking insufficient in itself. Monitoring democratic backsliding should track discursive shifts in institutions’ self-described purposes, since classroom meanings shape future citizens’ political imaginations.