Friday, December 17, 2004

Why Dutch children are escaping city schools

More and more teens in Dutch cities are travelling long distances every morning to schools in outlying districts. Cormac Mac Ruairi looks at why they are running from inner-city schools.

Long before the Van Wieren killing, thousands of VMBO pupils in the major cities have been avoiding the school around the corner and travelling long distances to schools in quieter, outlying towns. Daily newspaper De Volkskrant has reported that 19 percent of VMBO students in Utrecht go to schools in nearby towns, many Rotterdam students go to Bleiswijk and students in The Hague to Rijswijk. VVO, the organisation representing managers in secondary education, has warned that schools will have to come to some kind of agreement to avoid city schools being bled dry and outlying schools overrun.

In the cities, at least, an increasing percentage of the students are from immigrant, and therefore non-white, families. As schools get a reputation as a "black school", a lot of Dutch parents tend to send their children elsewhere. Black schools, or Zwarte scholen, have become synonymous with poverty, under-achieving, violence and drugs. The situation in the VMBO schools mirrors the increasing mistrust between the various ethnic communities in the Netherlands.

The association of public schools, VOS/ABB, blames violence in schools on a continuation of the hardening of society. But the very fact that some VMBO schools have to post guards, mount check points and install security cameras is off-putting for many parents.

Speaking about the new security measures at Terra College, director Gerard van Miltenburg said on 29 January: "Students and teachers must again have the confidence they are safe here". But as one parent in Utrecht explained to De Volkskrant, she decided to send her child to a VMBO out of town precisely because the local schools emphasised their security measures. "The first thing they said to me at the VMBO schools in Utrecht was that they had good contacts with the police, instead of saying 'we will make a person of your child'," she said. She said going from school to school in Utrecht was like visiting disaster after disaster: "I found myself in an environment I did not recognise".

This is a sentiment shared by many in Dutch society who claim that that life in the Netherlands is becoming bleaker. A student teacher told Expatica that she would rather be unemployed in the future than take a position in a VMBO school. "I am still looking for a placement, but I would sign up with a school two hours away by train rather than work in a VMBO in the city. VMBO schools are just awful," the student teacher said. "The children rule the roost: they decide what, when and where they are going to learn. And the teachers aren't supposed to correct mistakes, instead they have to praise the pupil for doing something right. "Children, particularly those in the VMBO system, need direction and discipline, but they are being allowed to run wild by both their parents and the system."

More here




THE ECONOMIST COMMENTS ON AMERICA'S ONE-PARTY STATES

Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of "diversity officers". Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities-the University of California and Harvard-occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.

"So what", you might say, particularly if you happen to be an American liberal academic. Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of "speculation, experiment and creation" that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s "ologies". Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital-unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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