School protests

Maybe some of the news stories from Taiwan seem odd in Western eyes, but the Netherlands are not excused. Read this link :

Thousands of Dutch school pupils walked out of lessons on Friday in wildcat protests organised online against lesson times. [...] [S]everal cars were damaged. Giant chess pieces from the Max Euweplein were thrown at trams and into shops. Three pupils were arrested [...] for vandalising a bus.

The stunning thing is not that these kids are protesting against a government norm that obliges their schools to meet a minimum standard of 1,040 hours per year. These are junior high kids. Ofcourse they want fewer, not more, hours. The stunning thing is that they get away with their vandalism and that the Teacher's Unions support them. In the Dutch mind there can be a lot of justification for these protests.

P.S.: 1,040 hours is about 35 weeks of 6 classes per day. (Dutch class 'hours' are really 50 minutes). The remaining 16 weeks are holidays. Apparently they need more time than that to destroy their country.

2007-11-26 (marcelk) | Tags: netherlands news huhwhat cultureshock