4. My childhood and a little bit about schools in the past

 Reading time: 6 minutes

My mother always told me that things were much better in the past. She said, for example: ' In the old days, people got a decent upbringing.’ I have always found it strange that my parents used to tell me this in a somewhat reproachful way. I was not well brought up and that was apparently my fault. I have always felt guilty about it. My father often called me a spoiled brat. He had a twinkle in his eyes when he said that, but somehow it was clear to me that I did not deserve all that pampering. Apparently there was another kind of life that I had no part in that would have been better, but well, we had to make do with this life.

 

By the same token, I’ve been afraid of old people for most of my life, except of course for my own dear old granny. But besides her, all old people seemed determined to point out my shortcomings at every opportunity.

‘Well now girl, are you quite comfortable?  That was not for us, when we were young. We were never allowed to laze. We had to work for a living.’

‘Did you get that? Well well, such a treat! In my days we had to be content with a bit of needlework, so we’d make ourselves useful.’

I remember when I first lived on my own, I didn’t dare to buy anything other than groceries, worrying that the lady behind the counter would ask me if what I intended to buy was really necessary.

 

My parents met each other during college. My mother was studying to be a pharmacy assistant, earning 12 guilders a month in the early days. That was before the introduction of minimum wage in 1969. Another noteworthy piece of history that had a big place in how my parents educated us: be grateful for the many opportunities you get nowadays!

My father studied history and pedagogy.  Much later I figured that he chose history to understand the war. I never thought to ask him. He was a teacher in heart and soul, both at school ánd at home . My father was strict but fair, though the latter was mainly his opinion. We used to be punished with house arrest, and our bicycles put under lock and key for a week.

 

We lived in a medium-sized town called X. I remember nothing of my first years, of course. My first memory is of kindergarten. It was run by nuns and it was awful. About forty children on long benches in perfectly straight rows, presided over by a few of those blackrobed women enthroned behind a lectern. I  can still recall the image, so frightening for me as a five-year-old toddler, of those three stern faces cloaked in black. You were supposed to be quiet and very well behaved. Every time I had to go there, I would scream my head off until they’d let me stay at home. Fortunately, around that time a neighbour told my mother about a small kindergarten that had recently started in an annex to a primary school nearby. I think that this place was quite a novelty in those days. There were small tables and chairs, spread around the room. There was a doll’s corner and a sandbox and you could play with blocks. I probably liked it there, though I don’t remember much about it. 

 

Then came primary school. My father would later say that there too, modernism had gradually set in. In first grade, we still sat in rows and the girl behind you could spit in your neck or pull your hair. It was easy to cheat, if your neighbour allowed it and didn’t bend forward with her arm around her notebook, shielding her work from your eyes. But in the higher grades, we were grouped together with four tables. There was no more cheating or secretly pulling someone’s hair and claiming that you hadn’t done anything. You had to look your classmates in the face and that was quite a change. For that reason we usually sat on our chairs back to front. I don’t remember much more about primary school.

 

The class of my eldest sister was the first under the new education law, the so called ‘Mammoth Act’ in 1969. This law was so named because wide-ranging that its introduction was an enormous operation.

Being a teacher, my father suffered with all this change. The last graduates of the former school type, the HBS (Higher Civic School), couldn’t be held back to repeat a year, because after them the educational system changed too much. That was a thorn in his side.

Apart from that I didn’t understand any of the discussions between my parents about the educational system. Life was the way it was, and as far as I knew, things had always been like that.

 

I now know that we are just beginning to enjoy the debatable pleasure that every child has to go to school. The educational system as it is today is not that old at all. At the beginning of the last century, most children went to school until they were twelve. In 1900, only eight per cent of all children attended secondary school. And they were all boys. Children got a basic education and then they were put to work. Like my grandmother. She did a course in shorthand and typing, and then she was sent to work in an office at an age when, sixty years later, I was still slouching over my school desk and cheating at tests. 

 

In 1950, 45 per cent of children went to secondary school or some form of continuation of primary education, and fifteen years later that number had risen to 84 per cent. So, my grandmother's generation worked from the age of 12, half of my mother's generation received at least some form of secondary education; starting with my generation everyone had to go to school until the age of 16 and my children are in school until their 18th birthday. Anyone who does not want to do so will be taken to court.

After your eighteenth birthday, everything is different. If by then you have not managed to fit the requirements of the successful people, you get cast away, as Peter and I have experienced.

 

Since 1901, all children had to go to school. That is to say, to primary school. Home tuition was also allowed in those days, because owing to the Constitution of 1848 everyone was allowed to teach, as long as the children learned what the law prescribed. Since the 1857 Act on Primary Education, for example, it was compulsory to teach the subjects of geography, history and natural science. Of course, home education was exclusively for those who could afford it. Ordinary children had to sit still in school desks, forty, fifty, sometimes a hundred pupils to a class with one teacher in front.

 

In those days children who could not keep up were labelled retarded, morons, imbeciles, or ‘nervous’. From the point at which all children had to go to school, the number of children who could not keep up proved to be surprisingly large. And, of course, people wondered why that was so. The variety of diagnoses we have today did not exist in 1901. Psychiatry as a science in its own right was less than a hundred years old. In 1795, as I read on the internet, the asylum doctor Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) released the chains of hysterical women in the Salpėtrière Hospital in Paris. This momentous act is considered the beginning of psychiatry as a medical science, that aims to help and cure rather than lock up and feed.

In 1901, when it was discovered that not all children were able to attend classes or sit obediently in school desks, there were also the problems posed by of a modernising society. Industrialisation had rapidly changed daily life. Technical progress demanded educated people. At the same time, the population's mental state of mind deteriorated considerably. A worrying number of people could not cope with modern life. Alcoholism, for example, increased, as did all kinds of stressrelated problems, then called neurasthenia or nervositas or hysteria. Without the social, caring safety net that we have today, these were conditions that drove people to destitution or to crime.

 

I wonder what Peter would have been called in those days. He didn't get his work done at school, or didn't want to do it. Retarded perhaps? He also sometimes ran away and at one time he threw the furniture about. Nervous then? Or were we perhaps considered high-risk parents? Husband at sea, wife having to cope on her own. They may have wondered if the children got enough encouragement. Just as they are asking themselves now. Today's specialists.