THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2011
Those cheese heads and how their children are taught.
Focus on education, in Holland:
Page 31,
of the magazine Holland Focus,
reenforces what I noticed when I first found the www (1996) and it struck me how schools, parents and politicians, in the Netherlands and Australia, go through the same motions, the same interaction and tensions.
(To state the obvious, caused by the act of sending your own flesh-and-blood off to be influenced and guided by other adults, financed by taxes, allocated by the people whom you try to vote for.)
I’m from Gouda. So can claim to be a true “kaaskop”.
( The regular feature is called: KAASKOPPEN, i.e. cheese heads.)
Naturally I zeroed in on page 31 of the current edition. As a retired primary school teacher, the type of involvement of parents, in their children’s school life, has, of course been of interest to me, i.e., the balance between supporting what the school is doing and ensuring that the best is being done for the individual child needs consideration.
Again this article proves to me how politicians telling schools how the learning process there, should be managed* is something that the Netherlands have in common with us, here in Australia.
I like author, Yolande Edens’ concluding paragraph and the understanding demonstrated by her perspective, in the article.
OzCloggie: I love the example given, where the politician urged that the students return to addressing teachers, using the formal ‘U’, while in the heat of debate, in parliament the prime minister was being called an ‘idiot’.
OzCloggie: The last 3rd (roughly) of my 37 years as “chalkie” (11 years) was spent at the one ‘smallish’ school, in southern Sydney. Pupils who transferred to there from inner-city schools, were sometimes still used to calling the teacher: “Sir”. They soon dropped that. There was a good balance of (in)formality. The discipline is not based on such matters.
- *Considering that not all of these politicians are teacher-trained or have a great deal of experience, managing class-rooms.