Dutch Education

On Thursday, we discussed Dutch education and how it compares to the American system. We also got a tour of Utrecht University and visited the most enjoyable music museum in the Netherlands.

Figure 1: Historian, Marijke Huisman, takes us around Utrect University as our tour guide. Here, she explains how the statue represents the man who founded the university and how most administrative work occur in this building.

Figure 2: Our first point of interest is the building to the left of this photo. Marijke Huisman mentions how the buildings on the left side of this canal were the first buildings that housed the female students of the university.

In my opinion, the Dutch education system is superior to the American system up until the graduate level. The Dutch start testing the young people at ages 10, 11, and 12, and based on their scores, they can choose to go to a program in high school that will gear them towards the university level or they can get trained to become technicians of some sort. This system is very advantageous because it forces the children to concentrate on education at a young age, thus building good study habits and character. It’ll also keep them out of trouble because they’ll be so busy studying and preparing for these important exams that they won’t waste their time with troublesome things. This system will also allow teachers to know that their class is very strong, considering how the young people who got excellent scores in the sciences or humanities will be in their classes, so the teachers can offer more challenging material to better prepare the students for university. Once they go to university, they must have a major chosen, so the students must be very decisive and sure of what they want. I consider this a positive thing because it encourages and trains people to think about what they want and be serious about the choices they make. It also fits in with the Dutch character of being task-oriented and serious as described in the reader: "What matters is the product, the service, the performance is improved (17)." So in order for the product, the service, and the performance to be good, the ability to focus and be serious about the decisions you make must be in tact. "In Dutch culture, imperfections are a challenge, something that must be overcome by stubborn hard work (17)." So work hard in school to be a part of overcoming all imperfections in society! The problem with this system is that if a person is not sure of what they want to do, they’ll struggle a bit in university until they get out into the real world. It’ll be then when they can change what they want to do as a career. I talked to some of the speakers today, and they mentioned how people look down at students who switch to a different subject in the middle of university because they look at that as if that person failed, so they must default to a different (supposedly easier) subject. In America, students change their major several times in university and people see that as the student exploring what’s out there until they finally settle down into a degree.

The major pitfall of the Dutch education system is that it puts children of immigrants at a major disadvantage. The Dutch placement test at ages 10, 11, and 12 are all conducted in Dutch, so if the children of immigrants don’t get exposure to the Dutch language, they will do poorly on the exam and end up on an undesirable tract. The Dutch education system can fix this problem by offering a program for young immigrant children to learn the Dutch language so they can have an equal chance to do well on that placement exam.

The United States education system takes over after the Bachelor’s degree because the US institutions are very selective on who they admit to do research, thus making the institutions very selective and elite.