This summer has been different. Not a completely stay at home holiday, but one that hasn’t seen me cross the Dutch borders. Like most holidays I document the trips we make in a small drawing book. No great aims or ambitions, just quick visual notes of where we go. That has meant images of forests, heathlands, the rivers and the coast.
Click here or on the image below to browse through the book.
I have quite a collection of similar books on the shelf in my studio. This is the first one that I’ve put into digital form. The quality is not too bad, and it is in the end a nice record of the ‘Corona summer’.
There connections to my other paintings that I produce is limited, although maybe there is just starting to be increasing convergence. A long over-due update and documentation of my studio work from 2020 should hopefully follow sometime in the coming weeks.
Dutch schools have been shut for five weeks. After the current May holiday there are eight or so weeks until the summer holiday. In any normal year it is a busy time, with so much to fit in as the end of year approaches.
But imagine that the schools can’t return immediately after the current Spring holiday, and that very well might be the case. What then? Well, we’ll be continuing with the current distance learning strategies. The jury is very much out still on how effective the learning and education that is on offer is actually being. But two things are certain, firstly, education is continuing and secondly, its success or failure certainly won’t be for lack of trying. The education world at all levels are doing their best in incredibly demanding circumstances.
With this as the background music, in the higher echelons of the Dutch Education system there is already talk of playing catch-up. The question is being asked, ‘how is the time that the schools are, well, not in school going to be caught up?’ There is talk of next year extending the length of the school day or of shortening the summer holiday to make good the ‘damage’. But wait a minute, the teaching staff are currently putting in extraordinary efforts to continue the educational process. This unprecedented situation we find ourselves in is leading pupils and staff to approach learning in some new and innovative ways and judgement is already being made that these cannot possibly be working sufficiently well, and we should be looking at damage limitation and how to make up the ‘lost’ time.
This approach overlooks so much. During the shutdown young people are still learning. They are still learning the conventional educational material (maybe temporarily at a slightly less high tempo than normal), but they are engaging with so many other things. They are being encouraged to work more independently, they are meeting new digital challenges, they are learning more about the world around them, they are learning about the dynamics of a pandemic, they are learning about their relationship with in a broader society and their place within it, they might also be learning about following the news for the first time in their life. Yes, they might very well return to school with a better understanding of a bigger picture that will stand them in good stead for future their development.
Others may return to school having struggled with the educational challenges thrown at them during the shutdown, that is perfectly true. But what about those who return having had to deal with unexpected bereavement and loss, or simple anxiety problems that have arisen from the events happening around them that have left them feeling insecure or simply afraid. Less obvious problems on the surface perhaps, but ones that will have lasting consequences if swept under the educational carpet in the rush to play catch-up. Education has a wide reach and a duty of care to its pupils in countless areas that go way beyond simple academic achievement, a fact that we should not loose sight of.
Finally, it does have to be asked, what exactly are we trying to catch-up. The integrity of an educational program and the curriculum you might say. Take out two or three months, and we’ll never be able to deliver the pupils to the demarcated finishing line at the age of, say 18. That does rather assume that the content that must be forced in by the age of 18 is absolute and strictly defined. Well, I suppose it is defined by the content of the final exams. So, is the whole idea of the catch-up, and throwing the whole educational sector, pupils and staff under still more pressure, just to be able to pass the exams? Could it just be, that it is the exams that are the problem here, and it is there that we should be looking?
I do like a good blog post title. Although I actually can’t claim this one to be one of my own. It’s stolen from a page on the travel section of the BBC website. The first line of the article is “Rotterdam is like Disneyland for architecture geeks”.
Last month I walked round Rotterdam with a few friends. Our guide on this tour was another friend, and someone who has lived his entire life in the city and has a history and arts related background and so was able to provide plenty of contextual background to the city sights we were exploring.
The residents of Rotterdam are proud of their city, and our ‘tour guide’ was day is no exception. There is a lot to see, as the BBC article explains, the city has quite literally, risen from the ashes of the war time destruction of the 1940s. Like in other cities, many of the buildings have been given names by the locals. We saw the Swan, the Pencil, the Whistling Kettle and others.
The combinations of the new and the old is often quite breath-taking but makes the view from street level all the more interesting. I’ve not actually been to Dubai, so it’s difficult to comment on the comparison of the Dutch modern architecture capital with that particular city. Although the cold winter winds that sometimes are channelled between the architecture of Rotterdam probably do give an experience somewhat different to the climate in Dubai!
The BBC article ends:
“Rotterdam is like Disneyland for architecture geeks. But it may be even more fun for the rest of us, who don’t usually pay attention to the buildings we work, play and live in, and who’ll go home and wonder why our cities can’t be a little more like Rotterdam”.
I first visited the Kröller-Müller museum in the Hoge Veluwe National park when I was an art student in London. There had been an official college trip organised to Barcelona and Madrid, however I and a few friends simply didn’t have the money to join such an outing. As an alternative we organised our own cultural excursion. It was a cut price affair, staying in the cheapest of cheap hostels in Amsterdam and spending, I think, five days visiting the cultural high points of the Netherlands.
Undoubtedly the most surprising to me then, was the visit to the Kröller-Müller museum. An hour east of Amsterdam on the train, followed by twenty minutes on the bus, before entering the park and picking up one of the free white bikes to get around the expansive landscape of the Hoge Veluwe Park. If I think back to that first visit I remember walking through pine forests and across dazzling sand dunes on a bright, crisp morning in early spring. It wasn’t what I had expected of the Dutch landscape. How different it was as a way to approach a museum art collection. My more familiar routine was to battle through the busy streets of London making use of packed buses and underground trains.
Crossing this windswept Dutch landscape brought us to the destination that our tutors back in London had raved about, the elegant Kröller-Müller museum. A stylish, modernist building housing the collection put together by Helene Kröller-Müller in the early years of the twentieth century and featuring the work of van Gogh, Mondriaan and many other modern masters. Behind the museum you have an extensive and ever growing sculpture park and forest.
Little did I know when I made that first visit all those years ago, that within three years I would find myself living in the Netherlands and within biking distance of the park and the museum. Regularly, as we did yesterday, we take our bikes and head off in a north-east direction. It is a 20km ride through forests and over heathland. As I said at the start, I’m yet to discover a better combination of physical exercise, landscape and art. The temporary exhibition for this particular visit being a rarely seen display of early van Gogh drawings.
Click here for more about the Kröller-Müller museum.
I left The UK more than twenty years ago. Not because I didn’t like it there, but because I had a Dutch girlfriend, the Maastricht treaty had just been signed and this interesting opportunity just came along. It wasn’t always easy, certainly dealing with the bureaucracy in the early years was complex and at times, less than a pleasure. But now, all that time later, I have absolutely no regrets. I have, for as much as it matters, dual nationality and I feel integrated into society. If you asked me if I feel more British than Dutch, then I would still say yes, I feel more British. Your formative years as a child, teenager and young adult, are it would seem, just that, very formative.
Working in education it is a privilege to play your small part in helping steer young people through these influential years and giving them some extra baggage and vision as they step out into the adult world. At the school where I work we make great efforts in broadening the international perspectives of our pupils, helping them see and understand wider contexts. We organise trips abroad, exchanges with other countries and work experience placements that sometimes take the pupils quite literally to the other side of the world. This is my Dutch educational context, but there are educational institutions all over Europe working along the same lines. The message is very much, ‘the world is your oyster’. With this as background it is very easy to see why the younger voters in Britain have been so despondent about the result of the referendum.
This week I have been asked so often for my thoughts on the whole Brexit debacle. I have watched from a distance with increasing disbelief. On Thursday night I was genuinely starting to believe that the remain campaign had done just enough. But no, headed by a group of opportunists behaving like secondhand car salesmen throwing their promises around a Pandora’s box has been levered open. What were the voters hoping that they discovered inside, a sort of nostalgic 1950s view of the country that never really existed?
There is clearly a very long way to go in this complex situation, and it does seem apparent that the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove might just be starting to realise just how complex. A poison chalice? Maybe, time will tell.
This week, when I get back to school I will doubtless be asked again for a perspective as one of two token ‘Brits’ on the teaching staff. I will talk about my bafflement at the behaviour of the politicians and my feeling of despair at the outcome. But above all the insular, inward turned message it gives. The world is a complex place, with difficult issues on any numbers of levels. It needs and requires cooperation and understanding, not distancing yourself when the going gets tough. My teaching I hope reflects this stance. I want my pupils to feel engaged and that they have a place and a constructive relationship in the broader world. Maybe if you plough through the statistics there are reasons for hope, a more open minded youth vote may seem to suggest it. But departure from the EU restricts perspectives, limits choices and does little to help young people find their place and their voice in a broader world. I don’t want the opportunity that I had, and took, to belong to the past.
Working in education it is a privilege to play your small part in helping steer young people through these influential years and giving them some extra baggage and vision as they step out into the adult world. At the school where I work we make great efforts in broadening the international perspectives of our pupils, helping them see and understand wider contexts. We organise trips abroad, exchanges with other countries and work experience placements that sometimes take the pupils quite literally to the other side of the world. This is my Dutch educational context, but there are educational institutions all over Europe working along the same lines. The message is very much, ‘the world is your oyster’. With this as background it is very easy to see why the younger voters in Britain have been so despondent about the result of the referendum.
Peter Sansom 