ELTE Trefort Ágoston Gyakorlóiskola

Minta Gymnasium ("Model") was a secondary school in Budapest, Hungary, founded by , Hungarian philosopher and educator who reformed the Hungarian school system. It is noted, together with Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium and the Piarist Gymnasium, for a number of talented students. History Minta Gymnasium was founded by in 1872 on the German model. It was a state-owned school for boys with a focus on training school teachers. "Minta" ("model") was not an official name, it was so called because "to gain qualification as a teacher, the student was expected to learn how to teach not only what to teach." Students of Minta practiced teaching, and teachers of the school worked with university students in parallel. The gymnasium got its own building in 1887. Mór Kármán was a director until 1896. Theodore von Kármán, mathematician, aerospace engineer, and one of the sons of Minta's founder Mór Karman, later wrote about his school years (1891-1899): teaching everything by showing its connection with everyday living. In our beginning Latin class, for instance, I remember that we did not start with rules of grammar. Instead we were told to walk around the city and copy the inscriptions on statutes, churches, and museums. ... When we had collected the phrases and brought them to class. The teacher asked us which words we already knew. We usually could recognize a few words among the phrases. If we didn‟t, we looked them up. Then he asked us if we recognized the same word in different forms. Why were the forms different? Because they showed different relationships to other words in the inscription. We continued in this way until we understood each phrase and why it was placed on the monument.