Universal Journal of Educational Research 4(8): 1772-1777, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/ujer.2016.040805 Paedagogus Hungaricus Denomination of Teachers in Hungary and Eastern Europe in the XXth Century Zoltán Gloviczki Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Pazmany Peter Catholic University, Hungary Copyright©2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 international License. Abstract The Hungarian word “pedagógus” means people who work as professional teachers in the educational system. Meanwhile the word “paedagogus” is a common European heritage, which is quite a unique lingual phenomenon. The paidagogos-paedagogus – across the Hellenistic culture, the Biblical use of the word, the language of the patristic age and the later theological and spiritual literature – becomes an abstraction without reference to the word of schools. The modern Indo-European languages consistently use other classical expressions (précepteur, professeur, maître etc.), or some own original words (teacher, Lehrer etc.). Though the Hungarian language has its original word covering the idea of “teacher” (tanító); this word is getting to mean in the course of classification of professional education (by ages of pupils and types of schools) teacher, namely the one, who teaches in a secondary grammar school. Its original role has been taken over by the classical “paedagogus” (pedagógus), instead of other original Hungarian possibilities thanks to a political-historical coincidence. It is surprisingly not a direct classical heritage, but an expression used by the communist party of the new-born Soviet Union, and it was spread by the local communist parties during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after the World War II. Keywords Greek Education, Roman Education, Paidagogos, Paedagogus, Nomenclature of Teachers, Hungarian Education, Soviet Union 1. Introduction Paedagogus[1]. The general use of this expression for professional teachers is a unique Hungarian, or an Eastern European phenomenon; Meanwhile the word comes from our common historical legacy. In the western civilization there is a parallel use only in Denmark, where 3-5 years in MA degree trained educators are called so, who get a degree as a kind of socio-pedagogue. They are paedagogs[2] in Danish. The western Slavic languages have also a generalized “paedagogus” expression in line with the ones similar to Russian utschitel. These are used in the official languages for historical-political reasons, similar to Hungary. The Hungarian version[3] of the OECD CERI[4] publication Teachers matter, which explores the international world of people affected by educational work. There is a linguistic problem which has been occupying for a long time the concerned researchers. They consider using the mirror-translation of English teacher (it exists in Hungarian – tanár -, but only expressing the teachers at ISCED 2 and ISCED 3 level) instead of the pedagógus. This lexical question has already been mentioned in the Pedagogical Dictionary in Eleven Languages, published by F. Arato, in 1982, Budapest. The Hungarian tanító (ISCED 1) and tanár (see above) correspond there to their exact parallels in other languages, but the identification of Hungarian pedagógus as a German Erzieher or English educator is very doubtful. The Hungarian Pedagogical Lexicon[5] mentions the problem as well, referring to the historical fact: the word pedagógus has been used from 1945, instead of the former nevelő (educator). Not really clear about what kind of process leading from the classical heritage to the use of pedagógus as a specialist in education; what more, to a special Hungarian or Eastern European use. The next question: How has the meaning of pedagógus covered all the person related to the very different aspects of education? 2. Method We examine the development of ancient Greek word “paidagogos”: its original role in the basic sources, the change of its meaning in Rome, first of all in time of appearance of Christianity, after the middle ages and renaissance. The use of paidagogos-paedagogus expression and expressions that have changed it can be found in the modern European languages including Hungarian,. This