by Ingrid Robeyns on February 14, 2007
The Dutch educational and academic system is in crisis. In the last couple of years, media coverage on schools and universities has been rather alarming, with reports on high drop out rates, 18 year olds who can’t decently write and who think opinions are factual knowledge, primary schools teachers who don’t sufficiently master mathematics, the brain drain of the best university students, overworked university staff, cutting of budgets and so on and so forth.
But now there is hope. Today, the media reported that the new minister for education, research and culture will be Ronald Plasterk, a highly succesful biologist who is a “Professor of developmental genetics”:http://www.niob.knaw.nl/researchpages/plasterk/groupleader.html at Utrecht University. He has also been a columnist for the daily newspaper “De Volkskrant“:http://www.volkskrant.nl/ and has criticised the previous educational policies in his column for that newspaper. He is also known to be an atheist, which, in my view, is a good thing given that the coalition contains, next to Plaskerk’s social-democratic labour party “PVDA”:http://www.pvda.nl, two Christian parties (the center-right Christian Democratic Party “CDA”:http://www.cda.nl/ and the left-bending “ChristianUnion”:http://www.christenunie.nl/en/).
I very much hope that Plasterk will be as strong in politics as he has been succesful in the sciences, so that he can fix our educational and academic system….
by Ingrid Robeyns on February 7, 2007
In the Netherlands, children between the ages of 2 and 4 (which is the age at which compulsory schooling starts) and who are not attending nurseries, can spend two mornings a week together in so-called ‘playgroups’. These playgroups are run by the municipalities. There is also a ‘pre-playgroup’ for kids between 18 months and two years, which only lasts one hour and where they are accompanied by one of the parents (or another adult). This morning a neighbour asked me whether I wouldn’t be interested in enrolling my son for such a pre-playgroup. But, she added, it’s only for mothers, fathers are not allowed. Apparently the justification is that otherwise mothers from certain ethnic minorities, where gender segregation is an important issue, would not attend with their children.
What should we think about such policies? In principle, I would strongly condemn such policies, since they are plainly discriminating fathers, grandfathers, and male babysitters. In practice, I can appreciate the underlying goal of offering mothers from social groups where opposite-sex parental activities are entirely out of the question more options to socialise, and also the social and developmental benefits for their children; but it does restrict the options of more progressive heterosexual couples to equally shared parenthood, let alone the options of gay fathers and single fathers. Since the kids of these ethnic minorities tend to be among the worst-off in society and we can safely assume that they are benefiting from joining a playgroup, I’m trying to look at this from its positive side – but I really have difficulties convincing myself that this is, all things considered, a wise policy.
by Ingrid Robeyns on December 23, 2006
When, some years ago, I read Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism and Heroism in Colonial Africa“:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold’s_Ghost, I was shocked not only by the historical analysis of Belgian Colonialism in the Congo, but even more about the fact that I had never learnt these things at school or university. While, partly thanks to the internet, nowadays many more Belgians know about the attrocities that King Leopold committed in the Congo, there is still a lot of denial about Belgium’s colonial role in Africa.
According to Adam Hochschild, there are “striking parallels between King Leopold in Congo and George W. Bush in Iraq”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-hochschild22dec22,0,2727390.story?coll=la-opinion-center. I expect that people will differ in their opinion whether this is an exaggeration or not, but at least I hope that the American kids (now and in the future) will get a more self-critical account of the US’s role in Iraq than what I learnt about Belgian’s role in the Congo.
(hat tip to “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/)
by Ingrid Robeyns on December 16, 2006
On Wednesday evening, a Breaking News session on “RTBF”:http://www.rtbf.be, the French-speaking Belgian public television announced that the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) parliament of Belgium had unilaterally announced their independence. It wasn’t true, of course, otherwise I would have written about it Wednesday night (wondering whether my Belgian passport would still be worth anything, and whether the Flemish independence would lead to a solution for “my conflict with the Belgian State”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/21/whats-in-a-name/ ). The newsbulletin, of which (very poor) versions can be seen on YouTube (“here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4hIotCD9R0, “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvHhSdgZKOw, and “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=452Nmk5rUmY ), looked realistic enough to understand that many Belgians believed it. From what I gather from the Belgian media, it caused a wave of consternation, and even some panic, throughout Belgium.
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