I was already wearing my coat, but my mother had any advice. As a semi-rebel 17-year-old, I started reporting to the dentist after a long abstinence, and she told me this: “Just tell him that you are at the gymnasium.” I grimaste what – and did not follow the parental advice. But I understood the message.
After all, the dentist had studied and apparently the idea of my mother – Year of birth 1918, raised in between Kleine Luyden In Sneek and with only primary school – gymnasial holes are filled more carefully.
That was the Netherlands in the mid -1970s. The standing society was rapidly crushing through democratization and social mobility. Everyone hurried to the insertion lane on their way to the egalitarian paradise. Mother nevertheless kept her Calvinist reserves: you never know because the elite cannot be trusted.
In the meantime, that innocent belief in social mobility has given way to deep concerns about segregation between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ educated (dentists not included). Highly educated tangles together and leave ‘the people’ in the roadside; A recipe for resentment.
Calculated the classic gymnasium, once the highest attainable, gets heavy in such a time. It has been overtaken by many other schools to ‘distinguish’ and excel you. Some gymnasia are already prepared under pressure from their falling turnover to tilt Latin and Greek as compulsory courses to keep students inside. Good idea. After all, you can also have soldiers call ‘pang’ when the ammunition is used up.
At my old school, the Marnix Gymnasium in Rotterdam, students recently protested – successfully – against the resignation of a number of popular teachers. Now they apparently get a ‘vision for the future’, which promises more attention to philosophy and art. You sympathize with the new rector, which started this week.
In the meantime, of course, the race will continue. In fact, the pace is increased, with youth who have just started to start networking and excel – preferably in something with beta – and during the study must grabble to bitcoins or mouth caps to walk in or at least live somewhere. Lower educated? Too bad, despite all the good intentions about boosting the status of the MBO. The ‘youth moratorium’, as sociologists call the time of freedom without responsibility, is approaching zero. Young people become what they were once: mini adults on their way to respect.
In my collection of old school newspapers, I find-in addition to a heart-cry about parties where Junior classics “misbehaved at the animals” (I remember that the last full holders were wiped out of the toilets the next morning-hey, the 1970s) a leaflet with which the school at the time pierced itself with parents. Title: Learn to keep the world going.
Of course we could not leave ‘Krititioned’ students on us. In the school newspaper a Philippica appeared against the brochure (head: Learn to keep the same world going). Requirement: more philosophy and art and less grammar. I was back from the dentist and co-author of that piece without holes, but I did not sign cowardly, in mind the Kleine Luyden At home: don’t give up at the elite.
Nowadays the Marnix advertises with a somewhat more contemporary slogan: Come, Leather and Overcomeafter the triumph cry of Julius Caesar, who committed genocide on the Gauls. Overcome, really? Veni, Vidi, VomitI would say.
You would hope that Gymnasia will keep away from the Rat Race To the victory and not go for high or higher but for wide and deeper. For everyone who wants to broaden his horizon. In that old brochure from 1977 I read that the gymnasium wants to offer students insight into “the origin of our Western culture”.
Then we laughed at it. That is now, with or without a diploma.
Sjoerd de Jong is editor of NRC. He writes a column every other week at this place.