2. Introduction
Readingtime: 10 minutes
Raising children should be a pleasant challenge for every parent. Our eldest son struggled through primary and secondary school with trial and error and our unfailing support. Our second son Peter was a special child from the start. Now I must say I find this a ridiculous statement. All human children are special, as my mother would say. But I don't know how else to describe it. Special is not welcome these days. It is inconvenient. It turns into a file that is moved from table to table and eventually disappears into an archive in the basement.
Peter was a special child. To us. To his loving family. Just as special as his older brother, but very different.
From the day he took his first small step into a school building, there
was a problem. From that moment on, every week there was a problem. Can mum
come over for a talk, we're wondering about something? As a young mother, laying
awake at night, I would wonder who exactly 'we' were. The entire school? All
the teachers? Do they all talk about my child over coffee? My child, who is
apparently different from the rest?
Education for all children is the gift of modern times. My father told me so many times. It offers equal opportunities for a good life, for freedom of choice, for equality. That last one, equality, is a tricky one. My child was anything but equal to his peers. Throughout his school years, he was the exception, the troublemaker, the child that was taken aside. The contrast between my experiences and the equality that the wonderful education of our time is supposed to provide, suddenly became apparent to me when I read Bertha von Suttner. And that may strike you as quite odd. Bertha von Suttner wrote about the wars of the nineteenth century. She lived from 1843 to 1914. In her book ‘Die Waffen nieder’ (Lay down your arms!), she demonstrates how the reasons for going to war were not necessarily determined by very grave threatening events that would have justified the sacrifice of human life. No, going to war in those days was a normal activity for heads of state, to secure the social status of the elite.
In the nineteenth century, people like Henri Dunant started writing about the horrors of the battlefield, and some time later Bertha von Suttner exposed the inherent self-interest of the elite in her book. She called for an independent court that would resolve conflicts between countries in a peaceful manner. Perhaps von Suttner's plea was heard, because at that time the emerging industry offered a much more lucrative way of making money and attaining status. There was a reason to change the system.
Industry did not need soldiers but skilled labor. It was economically important that people should go to school. A new era had begun, a new social order was going to determine society’s conditions. A new social order with its own casualties.
From 1901 onwards, all children in the Netherlands had to go to school until they were twelve years old. With the democratization of education after the Second World War, the authorities aimed to reduce differences and give children from lower-classes the chance to escape their background. The compulsory school age was raised to 16 and later even 18. Opportunity became an imperative. A whole army of educational specialists came to be, all owing their legitimacy to those children that cannot meet the necessary requirements. Today this is a self-affirming business model.
The system of care and education has become firmly entrenched in our economy. It needs victims for its existence. And this factuality prevents structural changes to the system, changes that would actually improve the lives of many children. The economy has no use for change. The victims of our educational system are the necessary link in our education-care industry.
I happened to read von Suttner's book after a horrible experience with Peter's school. It had been on my bedside table for a while.
Peter had turned eighteen. Almost immediately after his birthday, I was invited to school for an interview. I didn't know what this interview would be about, but interviews at school were an everyday occurrence, so I just went. With the courage of desperation. Jan was at sea.
I reported to the nice secretary in the hall and she went to fetch the schooldirector. Suddenly, an eerie feeling crept up on me. Why did the director have to be fetched? The invitation had come from the mentor. Director X joined me in the hall and shook my hand warmly. ‘Come with me, please. We are upstairs.’ We? I asked: 'We? Who is we?'
‘Don't worry’, he said. He led me into a room where the mentor, the care coordinator and the BP* were already seated. The headmaster sat down next to them and I had to take my place opposite this tribunal. And that was exactly what is was. The headmaster delivered a sermon lasting several minutes. I was to understand that the school had done more than enough, the others nodded eagerly, it was now time for us (who did he mean by ‘us’?) to explore other possibilities for Peter. 'But what possibilities do you have in mind?' I asked. 'He doesn't have his diploma yet, does he?' At that moment I still thought that the director included the school team with 'us'. But that was a mistake. I have made many in my career as a mother.
The whole team, as the headmaster explained and again everyone nodded eagerly, was of the same opinion: Peter would never get his diploma anyway. So we might as well stop now. The school was actually obliged by law to stop because Peter was 18. I was kindly asked to have Peter deregistered. Later I learned that this was not true at all. The school was under no obligation by law at all. If I had been more assertive I would have grasped that immediately. If they were obliged by law, the headmaster wouldn’t have had to ask me to deregister my child. But which mother takes a course 'Be smarter than the school director'? Or: 'Know your legislation' and the follow-up course 'Don't be tricked!’ I had no defence. They all agreed. Including the BPO employee who really should have stood up for me and especially for Peter.
But I only realised that when I had long since returned home. I thought of it at night. When I woke up and the thoughts jumped up at me. What should I do? Where was this leading? We had told Peter that school was very important. That he should try to persevere. With a diploma, he could achieve things. Get a job. Without a diploma, that was much more difficult. Come on, son, hang in there. And he went. Sometimes he didn't. And we pleaded for him at school. I wrote letters. I explained. Peter had undergone tests. There were reports. Surely the school could use this to determine what kind of support was needed? How many times had I been obliged to listen to the mentor, the care coordinator, that there was a limit to what they could do. That Peter was not their only pupil. And each time I asked myself: but what do you actually do? And now, all of a sudden, it was over. It came like a bolt from the blue. I wasn't prepared for it at all. I hoped that Jan would call. I hadn't heard from him in over a week. They were crossing the Atlantic Ocean at that time. Almost Antwerp. Then he would call. I cried that night. I was desperate.
From the moment he was expelled from school, Peter hid in his room and cut himself off from me. He had persisted because he believed in Jan and me. All those tests, therapies, talks. It must have driven him mad. We drove him mad. Dragging him about. From one place to another. Really, son, there is a point to all this! It will help you go up in the world!
And then he had to leave after all. He was simply expelled from school. And I had no more defence. I couldn't help him anymore. The school didn't want him anymore. Where had I gone wrong? Could I have prevented this? When it happened, Jan was not home. Could he have done something about it? Would he have put his foot down? When I ask him now, he answers reassuringly: I mustn't worry about it anymore, I mustn't think that anything I could have done would have changed the outcome.
In the weeks following the meeting with the school tribunal, I sank into despondency. I would sit on the kitchen stool and stare out the window, or lie on the sofa and just fall asleep, because, like Peter, I could no longer sleep at night. We led our own lives, separate from each other. He lived in one room, I lived in the room next to his. Every now and then Ingeborg would whirl through, see our faces and vanish to her friends. Sam was busy with his studies. He had discovered partying. He and Peter were growing apart. I saw it happen. Where had their closeness gone?
Bertha was on my bedside table. I started reading for distraction, because I needed a terrible story to put my desperate feelings into perspective. But to my surprise what I found in von Suttner's war story from more than a hundred years ago, were similarities. I saw similarities in the ways structures get entrenched in society, how they become part of an economy. How people hold onto things that have always been so and therefore must be as it should be, because remember, we also had to go to school, and great-grandfather was a soldier too. And if half the population succumbs, boys die, people get sick, food runs out, still things are right and proper just the way they are.
Bertha von Suttner gave me an insight. I suddenly saw just how impossible our struggle is. We are just a cog in the wheel. We are nothing but cannon fodder for the people who make their living off us. You may find it preposterous to compare our children to the young boys shot to pieces on the battlefields of Schleswich or Crimea in the nineteenth century. But after all those years that Jan and I devoted ourselves to keeping our child in school, to meeting the demands of the government, of society, all those years of having to cope with criticism of Peter's behaviour, his performance, his development, all wrong according to the specialists, without anyone ever offering a single solution that would have made the boy happy, would have helped him on his way, I have gone totally to pieces. My child has gone to pieces. We can’t go on anymore.
What did we, ordinary citizens, expect from life? The same as people in the nineteenth century. We do exactly the same things and dream exactly the same dreams. You are young and you meet someone. You get married, or maybe not, but you start a family, work to earn a living, have a roof over your head. And apart from that, you have one more modest wish; to be a little bit happy and to stay healthy. And you imagine that if you just do your duty as a mother, as a father, as a worker, as a citizen, that your wish will be granted.
But not for us. Not for Peter. He became a toy for people with a mission. We, Jan and I became subject to the system. We had to go all the way until they were done with us. The victim, our beautiful Peter, will be left behind as a small germ in society. Just as cholera decimated cities in the nineteenth century after bloody wars, so Peter and his fellow victims will slowly but surely make society incurably sick. How will administrators respond to that? With reform schools? Prisons?
I have decided to delve into the history of our current system of care and education. Why did it become what it is? I'm going to look for an explanation. I want to show that for the sake of the system we mistreat and destroy our children. And this has to stop.
Translation: B. Ton
* A BPO person is an Appropriate Education Supervisor. An invention of the Appropriate Education Act, to replace the ambulant counselor who had approximately the same tasks but was a product of the Act on Expertise Centers, also known as the Backpacks Act.
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