Each Child is Different: How the Dutch reinvented Primary Education

By Joost Ramaer

What started in 2011 with a father, concerned that his four-year-old daughter would get the same traditional primary education as he got in the mid 20st century, has led to 38 (and counting) totally reinvented primary schools in the Netherlands and abroad. In 2015, the so called Steve JobsSchools were selected “one of the most innovative schools in the world” by Tech Insider.
In Each Child is Different, investigative journalist Joost Ramaer shares his initial scepsis and growing amazement, watching the schools prepare children for their future with revolutionary educational practices and the latest technology. A must read for every educational innovator.

Each Child is Different is also available in print ISBN/EAN: 978-94-92383-19-8.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joost Ramaer
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9789492383204

Book preview

1. Prologue

The British professor Ken Robinson, now Sir Ken Robinson, is an internationally renowned educationalist well-known for his riveting TED Talks on education. Eight years ago in one such talk, he stated:

‘My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy. [....] Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.[....]

And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.’

Janet Visser is the principal of the Master Steve Jobs public school in Sneek, the Netherlands. This is what she has to say about her own school career: ‘My teachers used to say: Janet is a nice, enthusiastic girl, but hard to handle. School did not challenge me. I was always the first one to finish my book.

Having started at honors level, I quickly dropped to mid-level general education and then to vocational training. Especially the mandatory classes bored me to death. I completed my vocational teacher training and eventually went on to university.

When I finished my education, I started working as a teacher in special needs schools. And I had children of my own. My kids are like me: my daughter is experiencing the same challenges at school as her mum. She also mainly likes the creative subjects, just like I did.’

Han van der Maas is professor of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. He’s spent many years studying how children learn: ‘The performance levels of individual students in primary schools vary considerably. On average, 20 percent of students are one year ahead in math, and 8 percent are two years ahead.

Most schools, however, will teach all of these children in the exact same way. First: Teacher instruction. These instructions will be the same for everyone in the class. Next: Each child will do the tasks that go with the instructions. So, again, the same for all. And finally the teacher needs to check the students’ work, which takes a lot of time.’

Monique van Zandwijk is the principal of the Digitalis public school in Almere, created by a school merger. She relates what happened: ‘Digitalis started in 2011, when a regular school with a majority of students from an ethnic minority background merged with a Jenaplan school with mostly white students. This created immediate revolt among the parents. To get a better understanding of what our new school should look like, we had the parents fill out a questionnaire.

A striking number of parents indicated that they wanted digital technology to play a larger role in the educational environment of their children, and that art and culture should receive more attention in our school.’

Maurice de Hond is the father of five-year-old Daphne and a successful entrepreneur. He describes where he got the idea to start this new type of school:

‘In November 2011, when Daphne was two years old, I had a business meeting with Lodewijk Asscher, Alderman of Education in Amsterdam. I had just broadcast a piece on national TV about the toddler revolution that was taking place without adults noticing. Also, Daphne was going to a kindergarten in the same building where the children from my first marriage used to go to school. Whenever I took her to school or picked her up, I couldn’t help noticing that the classrooms hadn’t changed in thirty years.

With all this in mind, I told Lodewijk that I had serious doubts that this school could do an adequate job in preparing my daughter for the future, even though she was already preparing herself quite fanatically at home. Lodewijk replied with a question that changed my life quite profoundly, and, in turn, would later change those of others as well. Why don’t you start a school yourself, one that meets your own requirements? ’

Yvonne Kieft teaches at the public primary school Digitalis in Almere. Just two years ago she was on the verge of leaving education, after forty years of putting her heart and soul into the classroom. Here’s why:

‘Originally, I was a kindergarten teacher. I saw how education for this age group changed when testing was introduced. There was an increased focus on negative test results, not on the positive ones. Any problems had to be resolved ‘within six weeks’. But most of these issues just cannot be resolved within six weeks.

We were tested ourselves as well. We used to have a white-gloved inspector visit us to check whether our classroom was clean enough. Mine was called Miss Broere, I’ll never forget her. Then the skills checklist was introduced, with forty items to be ticked. Some of my colleagues couldn’t sleep for days when the Inspectorate was about to visit. ‘We are here to investigate your inadequacies,’ they would say. The available grades were ‘very weak’, ‘weak’ and ‘sufficient’.

We also had to start creating ever-expanding reports. Development plans. Group plans. Progress per child. Around ten years ago, my irritation level gradually started to rise. In November 2013, at almost sixty, I decided to quit. I was just completely fed up with education.’

Marianne is the mother of Joris, who is now at Digitalis after having tried many other options: ‘His preschool teachers already noticed that Joris was highly intelligent. But being gifted is only part of the story. He is two or three years ahead of the other kids in language, but less so in math.

He is very much a loner; as soon as he gets the idea that someone is mad at him, he shuts himself off. Handling him takes a lot of care and attention. It’s not helpful to keep ending up at the point where they suggest: ‘Maybe he’s autistic?’

He started out at a regular school. He got bored and the school didn’t do anything about it. He did well at his second school until he started his third year. The teaching materials he was presented with were far beneath his ability. Joris started roaming through the school and eventually stopped doing anything at all.

In the middle of the school year, in January, he got placed at a Leonardo School for gifted children. He was given a six-month trial period. That didn’t last for long either: ‘We cannot handle severe underperformers,’ we were told by the school. Which is strange, since highly intelligent kids often underperform in school.

After a couple of months Joris just shut down completely. At a certain point, he refused to go to school altogether. School didn’t want him back after the summer break either. He was about to become a dropout.’

These scientists, principals, teachers and parents had never met. Yet they each encountered similar obstacles on the path of education, at different points in time and independent from one another.

This is the education that is supposed to prepare children for their future, starting when they enter primary school at age four. Governments spend millions, while parents and children lose sleep over recurring standardized tests and other major exams. Education is considered to be the determining factor for success or failure in society, and we remember our most inspiring teachers with fondness for the rest of our lives.

The importance of a thorough education is indisputable. Everyone involved tries to make the best of it, yet the same dull veil shadows education across the globe, particularly the first six years of education.

It is as if the enormous variety of the world’s languages and cultures doesn’t exist. Decrepit, worn-out school buildings. Underpaid teachers. A handful of third-hand computers. Textbooks that have hardly changed over the past thirty years. Children who perform badly or clash with their school environments, or both, and get stamped with a label: ADHD, dyslexia, autism.

Wherever we look, society is changing faster than ever - except in primary education, where stagnation seems to be the standard. Why is it so hard to make changes? And can it be any different?

This book tells the story of a group of people who envisioned a new type of primary school: a school that makes the best use of current digital technologies in order to change and improve the way education works.

1.1. Teaching how to learn

Education – it’s just there.

We go through schools and universities as they are presented to us, without looking at them too critically – just because we ‘have to’. As getting a job and climbing the societal ladder require diplomas, we tend to focus on the final result, not on how we get there.

Maurice de Hond was no exception. He had never really stopped to think about his own school career, nor about those of his first four children, all grown-ups by now, even though two of them had a hard time at school. It was only when Daphne arrived that he started to think about education. Daphne was born in 2009 from his third wife, Mari Petell Rodriguez, whom he had met in Cuba. By the time Daphne turned two, her dad owned an iPhone and an iPad. He installed some apps on his devices that he thought she would enjoy.

One of these apps was Sound Touch, which contained 72 drawings depicting animals. He would say ‘dog’ and if Daphne touched the right image in response, a photo of a dog would be displayed. You could even hear it bark. Daphne mastered those 72 words in no time. She also likes Toca Boca, an app that allowed her to make music, design clothes or create fancy hairstyles for virtual characters, long before she could read or write. And she didn’t need her dad’s assistance for that, either. Daphne could handle the iPad and iPhone very well by herself.

‘When I saw that she was doing so well,’ De Hond recalls, ‘I concluded that small children are in fact creative minds with bodies that are still limited.’ By the time she was two, Daphne had acquired skills that she would only be taught in elementary school at around the age of eight years old. Schools organize their teaching and exercises incrementally over time, both by subject and by difficulty (from easy to increasingly hard). Today’s children, however, start to learn earlier and acquire skills at a much less even pace, often without assistance and in the order that’s right for them.

Acting on the ‘toddler revolution’

De Hond realized that this digital era had supplied them with the instruments for quicker and more intuitive learning. A Toddler Revolution was happening – as the headline of a TV column he broadcast on Dutch national television in 2011 declared – yet the field of modern education seemed to have completely missed out on this. De Hond regularly dropped his daughter off at the daycare center, which happened to be located in the same building where his first two sons had attended elementary school. It struck him that the classrooms had not changed in thirty years. How could that be?

The final breakthrough came in 2011, when he visited Lodewijk Asscher, the then Alderman of Education in Amsterdam. In this meeting, De Hond openly expressed his doubts whether the Dutch school system would sufficiently prepare his daughter Daphne for her future. ‘Well, why don’t you start a school yourself then, one that does meet your requirements?,’ Asscher responded, pointing out that Dutch law leaves room for such initiatives.

Once home, De Hond started googling and discovered that parents can indeed start their own school in The Netherlands. It can even be financed by the government, provided the school’s municipality registers the school in their ‘School Plan’ and at least 300 students enroll within its first five years. The resource of the world wide web also helped De Hond find the people who would help him realize the project.

As it happened, he wasn’t the only one who wanted to reform elementary education. One of the people who joined him at this stage was Irene Felix, teacher and grandmother to a five-year-old grandson who ‘corrects her when she’s not fast enough with her iPad,’ as her CV notes. Educationalist Luc de Vries and Erik Verhulp, social geographer like De Hond himself, completed the quartet. Verhulp is the CEO and founder of De Digitale School (The Digital School) or Digischool in the Netherlands, which offers alternative learning tracks for students and teachers, and supports them through advice and educational software.

De Vries had been a member of the Denver group, a delegation sent by the PO-Raad, the national council representing elementary school boards in the Netherlands. In 2010, this group had attended the United States Education Summit on educational reform through new technologies in Denver, Colorado. At the time, De Vries had written a report for the PO-Raad on how to reinstate Dutch elementary education among the best in the world within ten years.

Education for a New Era

This quartet of forward thinkers began brainstorming a new type of elementary school that would make the best possible use of the opportunities the digital revolution offered. In March 2012, they published a short Manifesto. In only four pages, the founders laid down their concept which they baptized Onderwijs voor een Nieuwe Tijd, Education for a New Era, also known as O4NT on the web.

As a tribute, they named the new schools that would align their teaching practices with this concept after Steve Jobs, who had just passed away a couple of months before. ‘We are convinced that the invention of the iPad marks a new phase in the interaction between children and the virtual realm,’ they wrote. ‘Even very young children can work with the device intuitively. Through play, they acquire skills that are important for their 21st-century future.’

When the Manifesto was published, the ‘web wisdom’ of most Dutch schools remained limited to a handful of legacy desktop computers, incidentally supplemented by interactive whiteboards. Interactive whiteboards are expensive – everything included, they will easily cost around 2000 US dollars. And they only digitalize what’s already there: an outdated and unsatisfactory educational approach in which the teacher talks and students listen.

De Hond, Felix, Verhulp and De Vries realized that the iPad offered sweeping new opportunities. If each child could be provided with a device like that, with educational software and practice programs installed, they could all learn at their own pace and according to their own propensities and interests, without delaying the other children in their group or creating envy.

Plus teachers wouldn’t have to grade any work since the iPad automatically keeps track of the progress for them: the software will only grant students access to the second exercise once they have successfully completed the first. If the student begins making mistakes after a quick start, the program will make him redo the previous step, teaching him to correct his error. The teacher is always just one tap away from viewing his students’ progress, which frees him for other