Kohnstamm Lecture | Teachers as factory workers with ready-made teaching methods
The 24th Kohnstamm Lecture was delivered this afternoon by teacher special education and Volkskrant-columnist Merel van Vroonhoven, who traded her job as a top executive for that of a teacher. She denounces the neoliberal path that education has taken. “Children are seen as a kind of investment. How much money have I invested in them and how much return do I make?”
Five years have now passed since Merel van Vroonhoven (1968) left her job as a top executive and moved into the classroom as a teacher in 2019. This Friday afternoon in the Auditorium of the UvA, she addresses the audience about the crisis in which education—and thus society—currently finds itself.
“Everything depends on the individual teacher,” says Van Vroonhoven, recalling the words of Philip Kohnstamm, to whom the annual lecture owes its name. Not only can a good elementary school teacher make a whole grade difference in secondary school, but twice as many children pass with a good teacher than with a bad one, according to some scientific studies.
In short, a good teacher is very important. But what makes someone good? Well, says Van Vroonhoven, a good teacher has a broad body of knowledge and skills. “Like in my case, the spelling of 4,000 words, the difference between Mondrian and Monet, our electoral system, the circulatory system, and writing a soliloquy and a dialogue. And climbing a swinging rope. Get the picture?”
And how do you become a good teacher? “Over the past five years I have often asked myself that question,” says Van Vroonhoven. “Especially at times when I noticed that the oh-so-well-prepared lesson still didn't catch on and after a leaden day of teaching I wondered in despair whether I would ever master the subject.” The answer: You don't just become a professional. It has to be developed through on-the-job training and, for example, by checking out the tricks of the trade with “excellent teachers.” But it becomes clear during the course of the lecture that there is more to it than that. The teacher must also be given the space to be able to teach and develop. And that's not so easy, as recent years have shown.
“Being a teacher is anything but the lazy life with endless vacations as it is often superficially referred to,” Van Vroonhoven tells her audience. “It is a beautiful and meaningful profession, but one with too many tasks, too little self-determination, excessive societal expectations, and too little support.”
Van Vroonhoven is often asked whether she has a quieter life now that she is no longer chairperson at the Financial Markets Authority (AFM). No, I don’t, she replies, adding: “I work more and harder than ever.”
According to her, the real energy killers are the bureaucracy that inundates teachers and “other time-consuming nonsense, such as filling in endless reports and lists to satisfy administrative insecurity.”
As a result, “the remaining teachers, due to a lack of time, seek refuge in mind-numbing, ready-made teaching methods and increasingly turn into conveyor belt workers in a cookie factory.” With dire social consequences. A society where one-third of 15-year-olds are at risk of leaving school illiterate, and where 72 percent of VMBO (vocational school) students at the end of sophomore year achieve the level of arithmetic that should have been achieved at the end of eighth grade, she tells her audience. Or in the words of Van Vroonhoven: “It is a society without a future.”
She continues: “As a newcomer to education, I looked with great amazement at the world I had entered. A kind of Alice in Wonderland. I expected a public sector but encountered a quasi-market sector that reminded me of the business world I knew so well. Neoliberal thinking is still dominant in education. But the idea that market forces will improve the quality of education is an illusion.” The current testing culture does not help. “Children are seen as a kind of investment. How much money have I invested in them and how much return do I make? Completely irresponsible.”
In short: “Years of neoliberal short-term policies have eroded Dutch education.” Administrative efficiency thinking and dashboard management have turned the teacher into “a performer who, to survive, seeks refuge in mind-numbing, ready-made teaching methods and checklists.”
Merel van Vroonhoven worked for many years in top administrative positions at NS, ING, and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets until she traded boardrooms for the classroom in 2019.
Now she is a teacher in special education. She also writes columns for de Volkskrant and is Chairperson of the Supervisory Boards at Stichting Lezen and Het Nationale Theater.
The direction of education must therefore change, Van Vroonhoven concludes. But how? Teachers must reclaim more of their profession, she believes. They must demand more preparation time and space for professional development. In addition, a well-organized professional organization could also make a difference. It could deal with professional standards and the content of the profession.
Another proposal: Why not have a national teacher's academy with a “high-quality curriculum,” where the bar is set high? That academy, where not only teachers but also school leaders can be trained as researchers, could then be rolled out across the country through regional annexes with the same curriculum.
But some changes can also be made at the top, according to Van Vroonhoven. Set stricter requirements for the professionalism and competence of administrators and internal supervision, for example. Give the Education Inspectorate the power to intervene more forcefully and swiftly when education is poor, including at the board level.
And politicians must also do things differently. They need to stop scattering occasional subsidies and instead fund schools structurally. They should eliminate competition between schools by not allocating funding based on the number of pupils or students. Ensure an education budget that at a minimum meets the UN standard of six percent of GDP. And they must also make teachers' salaries more attractive.
Finally, Van Vroonhoven points to the commercial parties in education, so-called shadow education, which is “rampant” and gives an advantage to students whose parents have enough money to buy extra education. “Tackle market power harder,” Van Vroonhoven advises.
She also has another message for education administrators. “Personally, as an education administrator, I wouldn't be able to sleep if I knew that my schools were ‘delivering’ children with inadequate reading skills because they have dropped classes repeatedly or because the craftsmanship of my teachers and school leaders was being snowed under by lousy working conditions, administrative burdens, and paperwork as a result of my administrative choices,” says Van Vroonhoven. “I'm not a fan of parents who intervene, but I sometimes wish that we had school boards that intervened, boards that kept all the nonsense away so teachers could focus on the craft.”
