Opinion | ‘What is education really about?’

‘The education system is still largely based on what was useful during the time of the Industrial Revolution: it is focused on tests and scores, and on the optimization of that output: more, better, higher. I worked at a Montessori school for a while, and in my classes I experienced what really works best for students. These are projects where children feel: I can make a difference, I can shape the world I want to live in. For example, projects about clothing, about nutrition: we turned an old T-shirt that children no longer wore into a gym bag to let them work on reuse themselves, we had vegetarian and vegan tastings, we devised together with the students how to make their own the city could become greener, we went into the city ourselves to see what happened to the gray areas: why are there so many tiles here, can this be done differently? They have also submitted those plans to the municipal council. During those projects, the children were completely engaged; in fact, that was all they wanted to do.

“It is contradictory that as a school and also as parents, as a society, we say to the children: nice projects, but how are things going with language and arithmetic, and what score do you have on the test? While: what is education, and life, really about? If you ask me, it’s about teaching children how to take good care of themselves, how they can be of significance to their environment, now and not later. Learning for later, that is the traditional image of school, scoring well on tests so that you can have a good job later. Why not learn for now?

“I always had plenty of support from my previous school, but it was still a struggle. Sustainability in social and ecological terms should be the starting point of education and not just another subject. That’s why we came up with Terrawijs. We are now in the process of opening this new primary school, initially in Deventer. If everything works out, we will start in August 2025.

“Terrawijs must become a school where you learn to build a healthy future, where you learn to find your passion, that breathes sustainability, and that is connected to nature. A school with a different starting point, namely collective well-being instead of individual prosperity. There are elements of what we have in mind in educational concepts such as independent schools or Montessori education, but these too are actually concepts from a different time.

At this school you can build a healthy future.

“Yes, of course there are requirements from the inspection. You have to monitor the development of the children and you have to administer certain tests. But how you deal with those tests and what you then communicate about them to the children and how you deal with them to parents: there is much more room in that than people sometimes think.

“It is not easy to start a new school. You must have signatures from parents nearby. You must then meet six soundness requirements and nine other quality requirements. This ranges from administrative level to educational provision to shelter, housing, everything has to be described. Logical, but it is intensive. We wrote 200 pages and 28 documents to meet all those requirements. In addition, we come up against rules that stipulate, for example, that new schools must initially be located in existing school buildings. However, these locations do not fit the concept, we need our own place with access to nature and preferably a sustainable building, because that is the core of our concept. Fortunately, the municipality is sympathetic.

“The irony is that we are going to set up a school that is all about connection, greenery, nature, the outdoors, and that we have to sit behind a laptop all the time to achieve this.”

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