For years it was a discussion at birthday parties that we, ‘after the Mammoetwet’, always lost. The hbs, that used to be a school. Such a shame that the HBS was killed in 1974. Education at a high level, with a wide range of subjects, humanities, sciences and trade subjects, without that snobbish and superfluous Latin.
This was often followed by the list of famous former HBS students: politicians such as Willem Drees and Wim Kok, entrepreneurs Anthony Fokker and Freddy Heineken; Nobel Prize winners Van ‘t Hoff, Lorentz and Tinbergen. Not pale scholars, but men of action. Men, yes, because the higher civic school was initially intended for the sons of the wealthy middle class, not the daughters – from 1871 they reluctantly admitted girls. I myself always associate HBS with rebellious young poets such as Willem Kloos and Albert Verwey, who discussed their Amsterdam HBS with free-thinking teachers. There was something hip from the past hanging around the HBS.
A hip school
The hbs was hip when the first schools started in 1863. That breathes every page of The Miracle of HBS – An Education Reform That Succeeded by Jan Blokker. Blokker (also referred to as ‘junior’), historian, writer, teacher and once school principal of a school in Hoorn that arose from the local secondary education, wrote a dissertation about the first twenty years of the school type’s existence. Although he does not describe the 20th-century glory years of the hbs, it has become a fascinating, readable and by no means boring book.
Blokker delved into the archives of the first hbs schools in small municipalities, such as Goes, Hoorn, Warffum, Sneek, Veendam and Enschede, and gauged the ghosts of the time. The idea of progress, that the country needed decisive and well-educated people to modernize the country in the field of industry and technology, was the driving force behind the school: not to be left behind in a rapidly changing world. Optimistic people, with faith in their own abilities, were desperately needed. Such people did not complete the then existing schools for the well-to-do bourgeoisie, the gymnasia and the French schools, and the rest of the secondary education was of too low a standard. There was a gap, exactly in the form of the HBS.
Politicians of a confessional nature also saw this, Blokker writes. Something had to be done to regulate secondary education. Yet the founding and success of the HBS is almost entirely attributed to the vigor of the liberal statesman Johan Rudolph Thorbecke. Under the second Thorbecke cabinet, the Secondary Education Act was passed in 1863, from which the HBS emerged. The new school, for a new type of highly educated citizen, intelligent, educated, but not a scholar, would, according to Thorbecke, ‘do a great and lasting benefit to the country’.
Substantial government subsidy
Thorbecke thought that fifteen municipalities would receive a state high school, a great gift, because the school, often in new or beautifully renovated buildings, cost the municipalities nothing. Smaller towns in particular were given such a model school, because there was much to be gained there. But new municipal HBSs also received a substantial government subsidy. The teachers who settled there and played a role in the community increased intellectual prestige. Even where education was in denominational hands, such as Venlo or Roermond, a state high school was established. They were not welcomed with cheers. After all, they were public, godless schools, unwanted competition for the denominational schools. And: knowledge of the natural sciences could undermine belief in the Creator.
This explains, among other things, why the first hbs were not a resounding success and had few applications. Some schools also charged a substantial tuition fee and the demands were high, many students dropped out. In the end, the five-year HBS became more successful than the three-year-old. The five-year-old trained for leadership positions in commerce and industry, and gave access to polytechnic schools, the predecessors of technical universities. You could also study medicine and veterinary medicine as an HBS student. It was only much later that an HBS diploma gave access to almost all university studies.
Bycatch
The fame of the HBS as a social emancipation machine is unjustified, or at least it was more a by-catch that smart children from the lower middle classes went there. According to Thorbecke, the school was intended to civilize the upper middle class. ‘The aim was social progress’, Blokker writes, ‘not the elimination of class differences.’
According to Blokker, the success of this educational innovation is due to the flexibility with which it was introduced and the fact that the teachers supported it. The first HBS’s differed greatly, a municipality could mold the school to its own needs. Neither the government nor the school board exerted any pressure. Well-trained and enthusiastic teachers, often with a PhD, determined their own program, together with a director who was also a teacher. Teaching at the HBS was highly regarded and excellently paid. It soon became apparent that anyone who came from the HBS could and knew a lot.
Perhaps you should rather be homesick for those blissful conditions in education than for the HBS itself.
Jan Blokker: The miracle of the HBS – An educational reform that succeeded. Querido; 384 pages; € 24.99.
