Five Brothers and a War

Education in Holland

Schooling in Holland was, and is, vastly different from North America. Whereas North American schools are often broken down as primary or grammar schools, then middle schools, and finally high schools, Holland was far more flexible and overlapping. In Holland during the years the five van Pelt boys went to school (roughly from 1926 – 1947), the system was significantly different, and in fact was very different from the way it currently is in Holland. There are also similarities between Holland and North America in that private schools operated outside of the curriculum restrictions of public schools. The van Pelt boys almost exclusively attended private Christian schools. In Holland at the time, a kleuterschool (“kindergarten”) took in students who were 3 years and 9 months old, extensively using Fröbel systems, in a similar way that Montessori schools are now used. Friedrich Fröbel was a German philosopher and educator who invented the first kindergarten (German for “Garden of Children”) in 1837. Fröbel believed that children should learn through guided play and concrete, hands-on experience. Through self-activity and exploration, a child was to be nurtured and cultivated to achieve his or her full potential. Children left the kindergarten when they were 6 years old, moving into the first grade. Everyone was required to attend school up to the 8 th grade, typically up to 14 or 15 years old. To this point, the education was “free”, meaning that it didn’t matter how many children a family had, they did not pay for those schools outside of property taxes. A dissimilarity with North America included the fact that no school past the primary level was “free”, and parents often had to choose which of their children they could afford to send to higher education. In the van der Lecq household, with three girls, Flora, Ada and Emmy, and then a boy, Dirk (“Dick”), the decision was made to save money for Dick’s education, as he would become the breadwinner in his family and it was important to provide him with the means to do so. As it happened, Ada did not marry until she was 36 years old, and Emmy never married, so the economic pressures necessitating these decisions were very unfortunate, and had profound impacts on girls. Past the lagereschool (“lower school”) primary educational level, things became somewhat confusing. One option was to go to the ULO, the acronym for Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs, (“Expanded Primary Education”) which provided only the most basic education past primary. That would provide two years past the 8 th grade, meaning that students graduating would normally be 16 or 17 years old. Another option would be to go to MULO—meaning Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs (“More Expanded Primary Education”), which provided an additional year of schooling past the ULO. So this would mean three years of schooling past primary. However, it was also possible to enter the MULO after the 6 th grade, allowing students to continue through the 8 th grade, and then three years of what was essentially high school in North America. The system above the MULO was called the HBS—meaning the Hogere Burgerschool. The name means “Higher-Citizen School”, as opposed to “High School for Citizens”. The distinction is that the schooling system was intended to educate, on a practical basis,

holland

Five Brothers and a War

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