What is the importance of the gymnasium? Three books give food for thought ★★★☆☆

In Gymnasium – The story of a headstrong school type journalist Mirjam Remie introduces a classicist, Evelien Bracke, who did a project on classical languages ​​with pre-vocational secondary education students. The intention was to increase their language skills, but she especially saw the self-confidence of the VMBO students increase by leaps and bounds, due to the high status of these school subjects. No one ever expected them to be able to handle this. They blossomed.

It is a key passage. It turns out that children differ much less from each other than we think. Putting them in cages at 12 and making different demands creates inequality; children develop a self-image that matches their school type. It also appears that high expectations lead to high outcomes. And that children thrive in a cozy group of chosen ones with a dedicated teacher. In this passage, all the arguments for and against the gymnasium, the school at the top of the ladder of our education system, are condensed.

No, it’s not fair that, with our tax money, one child goes to a school where they are immersed in culture and history and schooled in debating and independent thinking, while others hardly get to learn at school, let alone cultural baggage. It is unjust, as Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema says in Remie’s book, for one child to go on a school trip to Rome for a week and another to the Achterhoek for a day.

At the same time, the example shows what good education can do: loving attention and faith in the abilities of children, that always works. The teacher could probably also have given the pre-vocational secondary education students lessons in poetry, or Chinese, or architecture.

That’s how it works at the gymnasium itself: it’s not about the dead languages ​​Greek and Latin – subjects that are rarely the reason for choosing this type of school, the usefulness of which is hardly demonstrable and in which many grammarians are downright bad. It’s about the special atmosphere, the togetherness and yes, the status.

The gymnasium, and especially the categorical gymnasium, where parents send their children generation after generation, is the means for the elite to reproduce. This makes it a coveted school for economic and intellectual elites – groups that overlap, but do not coincide – and at the same time an ideal tool for uplifting smart children of low-educated parents. Yet few children from that group penetrate to this bastion.

Threat

Recently two books about the gymnasium were published. In addition to that of Remie, who was education editor at NRC Handelsbladis that Gymnasium – History of an elite school van Diederik Burgersdijk, classicist and teacher of ancient languages ​​at the Cartesius Lyceum in Amsterdam and Utrecht University. Both writers have an eye for the growing inequality of opportunity in the Netherlands and its undesirability. Both see the mechanism of an elite that clones itself – for Burgersdijk, see the subtitle of his book, it is a key feature in the history of the school type. Both are nevertheless in favor of retaining the gymnasium and see the Education Council’s proposal for a later selection and a three-year first grade as a threat. Both are former gymnasts.

Remie collected arguments for and against the retention of the (categorical) gymnasium and early or late selection. As an Erasmus student from Rotterdam, she fondly recalls her school days, but ‘a grammar school student wouldn’t be a grammar school student if he didn’t look for the other side of the story, for the shades of gray, for the opposite of being right’. That sounds unintentionally pedantic. As if not every good observer or researcher, high school or not, would do that.

Remie wrote a pleasantly readable book with beautiful interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds who sing the praises of the gymnasium. The intervening chapters are reflections in which Remie presents facts and figures and quotes from conversations with gymnasium teachers and school leaders.

It has become a hybrid book, in which the rational arguments for later selection come mainly from research and the emotional, nostalgic pro-gymnasium arguments from the interviews. Many of those pro-arguments are not tenable. Classical languages ​​would offer students the opportunity to reflect on another culture. Sure, but you can also do this by immersing yourself in Islamic or Hindu culture. Greek and Latin grammars are so difficult that they automatically make you better in other subjects: it could well be, but you can also achieve that effect by learning Chinese or Hebrew. The friendly argument that the gymnasium is a refuge for children who are ‘different’, or who are super smart, is also subject to much dispute. Cockroaches also exclude others. And the gymnasium is not a school for the gifted; anyone with a pre-university education recommendation can go there.

Remie’s conclusion that later selection will not help because too much difference in level in a class would be unworkable, is not convincing. Countries with the best educational results, such as Finland and Canada, select late; apparently it is best that they differ in the class.

Interesting historiography

Burgersdijk’s book is primarily an interesting historiography. The gymnasium arose from the medieval Latin schools, which were attached to the church. From 1838 the school was called gymnasium and subjects other than Latin and theology were taught. The language of instruction in universities was Latin; those who wanted to study had to do gymnasium. Burgersdijk shows that the gymnasium often had to fight for its preservation: with the introduction in 1863 of the HBS, a competing type of school, with the Mammoetwet in 1968, in which the gymnasium became part of the pre-university education, and around 1975, with the imminent arrival of a middle school. Gymnasium survived and became more sought after than ever.

A remarkable conclusion of Remie and Burgersdijk is that it is not the schools themselves that are still reserves for the elite: the gymnasia do everything they can to recruit and retain children from less favorable backgrounds. Their mutual plea that gymnasia should attract ‘social climbers’ is sympathetic. But you can no longer climb to a gymnasium with us after you are 12, via vmbo and havo. You don’t easily slip into categorical gymnasia either – another reason parents prefer school. It is a pity that Burgersdijk, himself a teacher at a gymnasium of a lyceum, the non-elitist Cartesius, does not investigate the future possibilities of the non-categorical gymnasium in more detail.

Plea for later selection

Marjolein Moorman, Amsterdam’s alderman for Education, Poverty and Civic Integration, sees subsequent selection as the ultimate means of combating inequality of opportunity and the brutal rat race. Moorman, who was the first in her family to go to grammar school, obtain a doctorate and go into politics, is aware of the opportunities she has been given, the child of an ordinary family in the wealthy Wassenaar. She also grants that to others; reason why she became a social democrat.

Moorman’s book, Red in Wassenaar, which describes her personal and political development, is readable and sympathetic. Yet you do not forget for a moment that her inspired story, on the eve of the municipal elections, is a fine testimony of a PvdA member with his heart in the right place. The Amsterdam voter has rewarded her for this.

Moorman shows that early selection and fragmentation of school types in the Netherlands have not led to better results. Our learning performance has been declining for twenty years. We don’t have many stars either, despite the hustle and bustle at the gymnasium gates and the expensive tutoring. All the countries at the top of the Pisa lists have a later selection and the universities are certainly no worse.

These three books provide food for thought. The trick is to turn schools into places where everyone discovers and develops talents, where no one is underestimated or misunderstood. Keep the good of the gymnasia. Even if we were to introduce selection at a later date, the school type could find a place in the upper secondary education. A lot can be learned from the cultural climate at the gymnasia. Especially this: every child has the right to attention, trust and an uplifting environment. And on a trip to Rome.