14. The school for children with learning and educational difficulties (LOM-school)

 

After the Second World War, our present-day school system was set up with great energy. The school for children with learning and educational difficulties (LOM-school) soon became the fastest growing type of school in special education.

The LOM-school. I was talking to Lucia about it the other day. She was in town and came to lunch with me.

The LOM-school still existed when we were young. She laughed when I mentioned it. ‘The school for geeks. Do you remember?’ she said. ‘Anja went there, didn't she? The daughter of that friend of mum's, they made us play with her. Stupid child. She put my Barbie doll in her trousers!’

‘Oh yes', I laughed too. We were not always nice to Anja. 'She has become a hairdresser. She has her own business. Mum told me so the other day.’

'You don't say.' Lucia looked surprised. 'She wouldn't be able to do that now,' she added decidedly. It stung me. 'What do you mean?’

'Well come on, you're experiencing it yourself, aren't you? School is serious business. Even your Peter can't make it. Ha! There hasn't been a school for Anja's for a long time.'

'But is that all right with you?'

'No of course not! But what are we to do about it? Society is becoming more and more business-like. Even in special education children are expected to earn a diploma now. Let me tell you! That daughter of Marjan, friend of mine ... super smart girl. Draws beautifully. She is stuck at home. The school thought ‘treatment was prioritized’. That's how they put it nowadays. Treatment is prioritized.' Lucia pulled a face.

 

Treatment is prioritized. It's how schools rid themselves of the problem. A child in treatment doesn't have to go to school. Both the school and the parents are left alone by the inspection and the school attendance officer. And then what? After having been on a waiting list somewhere followed by an intake, the child goes to a treatment centre, where he has to learn what's wrong with him and how he has to control his defects so that no one is bothered by it. I’ve been there. Peter has been there. A child is expected to fix it so he can go back to the place where he was unhappy. So he fits in among the other children. To be like the rest. Who wouldn’t want that? Loads of people don't want that. Can't do it. But that is forbidden nowadays. Not fitting in is forbidden. That's the benefit gained from so-called progress.

 

What Lucia said about the LOM-school wasn’t right. The LOM-school was not for geeks. It was a school for children of normal intelligence who couldn't keep up at school, for unknown reasons. Like my Peter. Nobody really understood why, but these children couldn’t manage school like other children do.

As a young mother, I didn’t understand why Peter didn’t fit in. And I followed advice, because those people know more than I do. They are specialists who are going to help me and Peter, I thought. We must be doing something wrong and if I just listen carefully it will be all right. Now I’ve found out that still nobody understands why some children do not fit in. That we have a glorified school system and that all these specialists are still looking for the egg of Columbus that will ensure that all children will march along.

 

Nelleke Bakker's thick book directs me to a report of a study conducted in 1963. There weren’t any diagnoses yet in those days. Uninformed people now say: 'Didn't all children just go to school in those days? There were no so-called disorders back then, were there?’ And these uninformed people usually conclude that today's parents are just full of complaints. Everyone wants their child to be a professor and blames school if it doesn't work out that way.

But it’s wrong what these people say; those children with schoolproblems were there in those days also. They just weren’t divided into sections yet.

 

In 1963, the Municipal Pedotherapeutic Institute conducted a study on the pupils of two LOM-schools in Amsterdam. When the LOM-school was founded in 1949, no fewer than fourteen different types of school for special (primary) education were listed in the law. For deaf, for dumb, for blind and visually impaired children, physically deficient children, children 'suffering from tuberculosis', sick children, children 'suffering from seizures', schools for retarded children, schools for children in institutions, children who are very difficult to educate, wards of the government or under guardianship, schools attached to 'paedological institutions' and children with learning and educational difficulties. And finally, schools for children of inland shipping skippers.

In 1954, five years after the establishment of the LOM school, there were 866 children in a LOM school. In 1978 there were 28,000. Thirty percent of all children in special education were in a LOM-school. Thirty percent of all children who dropped out of a normal school therefore had a normal average intelligence. In 1986 it was almost forty percent.

 

According to Nelleke Bakker, in those days parents had no problem with chosing for the LOM-school, precisely because it was a school for children with a normal intelligence. At a LOM-school the classes were smaller and the children received a lot of attention. Attention from people who were still curious about children and how they grow. In the research report, it strikes me how much love and respect the researchers show for the children and the weight of misery they brought with them from the regular school. In the Lomschools, the aim was to bring back some light into those young lives. There, the orthopedagogical profession  grew into what is now an indispensable specialism in education. Nowadays, they’ve turned into ladies with heavy shoulder bags who run from school to school and no longer have time to observe a child, let alone give him or her some extra attention. They are mainly occupied with filling out lists and writing reports. And advising parents to have their child treated or sent to special education.

 

After a search through second-hand book shops, I find a copy of the 1963 study. A book, neatly sewn into a light grey soft cover. There are a few spots on the pale cover but the pages seem untouched. Yet here and there in the text I do find a few pencil lines. Someone has read it. All the children in the study have IQs between 90 and 110 (with one or two exceptions) and all did equally badly at the regular school for 'preparatory education'. The researchers look for a cause but do not find one. The children are described and examined in many different ways. Height, weight, health, background. Broken family, or not? Are there siblings and is the LOM child the middle child or the oldest or the youngest or half of a twin? All children have had the necessary 'dispiriting experiences' of failure and several times grade retention. Parents are described in the report, the mother's opinion of her own child is weighed in the balance. I read in this document, written two years before I was born: 'The birthprocess showed peculiarities in eight cases' and realise that very little has changed in 48 years. In my life as a mother, I have been questioned on this topic countless times by every psychologist, remedial educationalist and ladies behind desks for access to some form of aid facility. How was the pregnancy? How were the first weeks? Do you and your husband ever argue? Is your husband away a lot? Yes, he sails. Oh, well then that must be the cause.

 

Multitudes of successful students come from broken homes or from families where mum or dad works night and day and is away a lot. If you look for the reason for children's failure in such factors, I wonder if there has also been research into how many similar factors are present in children who do succeed in getting a diploma.

 

The researchers and writers of the report have a warm heart for the nervous, quiet, anxious, neurotic, inhibited, depressed-looking, shy, childish, weak, and so on children. There are no diagnoses, only descriptions of character traits, behaviour, appearance, cared for or not cared for, cold-hearted mother, moronic mother, father is an alcoholic and beats his wife, sweet caring mother, committed father. The researchers can only guess at the causes of the failure. And they have to conclude that, strictly educationally speaking, hardly any progress was made at the LOM school. By ‘strictly educationally’ I mean: according to the requirements of the government. The LOM-school did not succeed in eliminating the educational arrears and sending the children back to the regular school. And that was their assignment. Just as it still is the task of Special Education 50 years later.

 

But one thing is clear to the researchers: the children have all recovered enormously since they attended the LOM-school. And they consider this a more important outcome of the study than the finding that the pupils are beyond repair.

 

It will come as no surprise that I experienced some hesitation in publishing these data. After all, with the above in mind, one could quickly reach the conclusion that liquidation is the obvious course of action, as the appealing set-up appears to have little rational justification. (...)

When at the end of the stay at the L.O.M. school it can be observed that the personality as a whole has gained significantly and for example the despondency, the fear of failure, the desperate defence have weakened, even disappeared in some cases, then once again this cannot be documented in a system. Hence the very relative value of the elements we have highlighted.

 

What strikes me most about this old report is the solicitude with which the research was done. The researchers care about the children. It is more important to them that the children do well than that some government objective is achieved. I do not believe that in the 21st century such empathy will be found in the institutions that advise the government. I‘d be surprised if they have ever seen a child up close.

 

The Lom-school had a stigma. And I can confirm that. The school for geeks. But they weren't, and a survey in 1986 showed that many former LOM-school pupils ended up doing well.         I found an article about this survey in the professional journal of orthopedagogy of 1986. The surveyed 'former Lommers' had liked the Lom-school, especially because the teachers had had time for them, time for personal attention, but also more time in class. These pupils had subsequently completed an education and some were still engaged in advanced education to better themselves still further. 85 % Of those questioned had a job. The Lom-school was not a school for geeks, but for children who needed more time. According to the 1963 study and the 1986 survey, the Lom-school had a very important function for quite a large group of children. Children who eventually became part of society.  They started out in life with confidence in themselves. Like Anja, the daughter of that friend of my mother's who started her own hairdressing salon. Unfortunately, neither the well-being of these children nor the delayed yet successful development of many former Lommers were taken into account in the decisionmaking of our government. The sole benchmark appeared to be whether or not they were repairable. In the nineties, when I had my children, the Lom-school was abolished and merged with the MLK (Children with learning disabilities). The difference between the two types of school was the IQ, but since the Lom children proved impossible to push back into regular education, they were scaled onto the same level as the MLK children.

 

The MLK used to be called the ‘morons school’ and was intended for children with an IQ lower than 80. The new school type that came into being with this merger between LOM and MLK got the confusing name ‘special primary education’. However, it was not special education. Primary schools for special education, for children with diagnosed learning disabilities, were called special schools. At the time when my Peter was miserable at primary school, there were special schools for which you needed a  special referral and primary schools’ to which all children were sent who did not have a special referral but whom the regular primary school did not know what to do with. The assignment of this school? To fix children and to make sure that they move on to regular secondary education.

 

At this moment, in the spring of 2015, 15,000 children are registered as home-stayers. The programme Zembla had a programme on this subject on April 22th. The law on ‘Appropriate education’ was introduced last year. All the new laws have passed by for Peter en me. The Law on Appropriate Education came too late for him, but this law offers no solution for vulnerable children either. This law too was designed in favour of the system. Another law to make children fit in.

340,000 Children appeal to youth care every year. 10% Of the total number of 0 to 18-year-olds. Almost 40,000 of them are in an institution. Is that the benefit of modern times? A father in the Zembla-programme despairingly says about his son: 'He should go to school! All children should go to school!'

 

But actually this has been the case only for a relatively short time. For only half a century, we have had a law that says all children must attend secondary school. My parents' generation went to work at fourteen, my generation takes it for granted that everyone goes to school until eighteen and continues learning after that. Why don't I feel any gratitude? Surely it is an enrichment for society that all children have the opportunities to learn the profession of their choice?

For many children it is a yoke. They are forced to fail. There is no choice. No freedom. You have to.

‘You can achieve anything if you want to,' my father said. Now he struggles with his feelings, his love for his grandson and his worries about his future.

 

Peter sits in his room and plays games. He is not one of the 15,000, because he is no longer in compulsory education. He is not a home-stayer. He is not on welfare. He is not unemployed. He doesn't count, he is not on any list. 'I'm just in the way', he said recently. Another version of: 'I'm just wasting oxygen.'

I’ve got used to my feelings. In the past, I would have panicked at such a downhearted comment from my son, but the years of struggle have also made me more stoic.  

Vaguely, constantly there is this dull feeling of sadness in my soul and I carry it with me. That is all. There are worse things. My father spent the most defining years of his own young life in a horrible camp. He was humiliated and starved. He watched his little sister die of hardship. He had to bear his mother's grief and his own grief, while fighting to stay alive. A person thrives the better in the face of oppression, someone said to me recently. For my father, this statement seems to be true. And I comfort myself with the thought that one day Peter will stand up and say, 'I know what I'm going to do!' Then he will go for it. I know he will. Against all odds. And then he will come out victorious!