Introduction

It is easy to identify in Central Europe a number of denominational dimensions of the supply and the demand of education in modern times. A religious community is, obviously enough, a cultural cluster providing for the organised reproduction of its membership by inculcating in their young generations its main belief tenets, values and ritual competences too. Religious cultures thus promote particular skills and distribute cultural goods, but also generate various forms of habitus more or less favorable to learning. They may give rise - due to purely religious needs - to sophisticated networks of organised schooling for the training of believers and clerics. A confessional congregation also has specific social set-up in terms of the insertion of its clienteles in the given power structure, professional stratification and class fabric which defines to a large extent both its educational needs, ambitions and expectations as well as the means the group can invest in education.

In the forthcoming study of the educational scenery in early 20th century Transylvania all these topical issues will be - mostly implicitely - touched upon.

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Regional inequalities of development have usually historical roots, often related to long established factors of which only some visible consequences or outcomes can be controlled by socio-historical investigation. This cannot be the target of the present inquiry.

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Denominational heterogeneity also contributed heavily to enhance the uniquely complex nature of post-feudal Transylvanian society. This was certainly the most idiosynchratic regional mixture of confessions in a country known to be unique among modern European state formations by its religious multiplicity, exemplified especially by the lack of any religious cluster carrying demographic majority. The erstwhile Roman Catholic 'state religion' - while it remained the faith of the court and a good part of the landed aristocracy, fell just short of the majority, not gathering more than 47,3 % in 1880 and 48,7 % in 1900 of the whole population. This meant however that at least in most larger regions of the kingdom Roman Catholics did represent a qualified majority, even if - on county level - Greek Catholics (like in county Máramaros) and Greek Orthodox (like in Arad, Krassó-Szörény, Hunyad and Temes counties) could locally do so as well. But Transylvania was the only larger territorial unit in the Hungarian kingdom without any confessional group coming close to majority positions.

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Whatever this complex situation and the collective representations therewith attached may be (or may have been in the past), we are concerned here only with social realities in a comparative perspective, the basis of reference being the rest of Hungary proper (outside Croatia), in order to substantiate images and expectations about the state of development reached by the province at the end of the Dualist Era. The level of educational expansion is an integral part of this exploration which, by hypothesis, can be brought into correlation with other indices of modernisation. This exercise might produce controversial results in the sense that their significance can vary and their message differ, hence the importance of their circumstantial interpretation. They are indeed liable to offer cues for the understanding of denominational inequalities identifiable in the data bank published in this volume.