Standardized, streamlined education and students

Disclaimer: this is a question about education elementary school and what translates to "highschool". So I am excluding eg universities.

In the Netherlands strict standardized testing is the norm. Almost all educational institutes are state funded, and only if they oblige by strict guidelines. This implies schooling is free, but schools themselves are always on a tight budget. The exception are private schools, but they must still obey strict guidelines to exist as well(however not all of them) and enforce the same concluding tests. These schools are reserved for the very wealthy and usually cost upwards of 40kEUR yearly. The most prominent guidelines are a minimum grade average in specific subjects(more on that in a bit), grade retention to students ratio and hours students spent in class.

The inspection ignores any subjects outside of:

• Grade average in subject dutch language
• Grade average in english language
• Grade average in secondary language if applicable
• Grade average in mathematics
• Grade average in history if applicable
• Grade average in geography if applicable
• 2 hours of sports each week is mandatory

Anything else provided by the school is ignored. Each school must obey to provide 32 mandatory school hours weekly. Each school must submit and track hours in class for each student. Students that fail to meet the assigned hours are sent to meet a state representative to sanction them, and the school gets a lower grade on this particular subject. Each school must provide the same basic subjects, but may add more if they wish to(which is, however, quite hard as the guidelines don't leave a lot of room for many peripheral courses - most schools have sporadic extracurricular classes or simply 1 or 2 throughout the year exlcuding sport). Now the actual streamlining; each school must enforce a concluding test designed by the state. This test is enforced nation wide, so each school needs to teach the exact same subjects for if students fail this national test the school will get a lower grade. Only mathematics allows for a bit of free space as it is in fact layered based on "skill"(grades), there are a modicum of different tests designed specifically for the student's alleged competence(3 in total).

The result of this is that practically every school teaches the exact same things in the exact same way. Most schools even use the same books as they are guaranteed to cover the material found in the concluding test. Almost all schools sport mandatory homework. Very few schools sport room for extracurricular activities. Subjects besides the mandatory state assigned are generally hard to fund, as most money needs to be spent on making sure the "important" subjects are passed. If not, the school gets a poor grade from the state which consequently leads to fewer students joining the school and thus a drop in state funding the subsequent years. Art and music is hilariously underrepresented in the Netherlands and is generally completely ignored.

Essentially its a layer of grades(nation grades school -> school grades students and teachers) that leads to schools slowly creeping towards becoming perfect replicates of the state designed educational programme. Teachers do not get the room to experiment as poor grades result in the school getting a poor grade, resulting in less funding. Schools can not experiment at all, and can not organize to teach outside of the enforced. Even the enforced material is usually very strict as children must pass the concluding test for the school to get the appropriate funding for the following years.

To me this is a terrible streamlined design that represses the students freedom to express themselves or explore(no room for extracurricular material, teachers have no time to design their own material outside of the mandatory). It further causes the whole nation's schooling system to obey rules made by a handful of people. Good schools are schools that pass their strict guidelines. Any other schools have no room to exist unless funded by very wealthy parents. Yet I've never discussed this with anyone else, and there seems to be no better place to do this at than r/education

What do you guys think?

Submitted February 15, 2020 at 05:10PM by Gloriouspieps https://ift.tt/31WLqPv