Amsterdam High Schoolers Leave Education Protesting to Their Teachers

By ANTOINE

Students at Cygnus Gymnasium School missing class due to absence of teachers.

March 15, 2018

AMSTERDAM – Today, a third of the Cygnus Gymnasium School (CGS) teachers left to protest for education rights in the Hague, but none of the 830 students joined them. Twenty-six teachers left in the morning for Malieveld park to attend the first entire education sector protest in the Netherlands, but students chose to focus their protesting against climate change instead.

Primary, secondary and higher education teachers joined forces demanding the government to invest four billion euros into the education system. From midday to two in the afternoon, over 40000 teachers, students and partisans showed up in The Hague to stand for their cause. This protest is a culmination of the many that occurred recently, with the first actions having taken place in September 2018. This first overall education strike choose to focus on demanding money for education rather than focussing on policies directly.

Despite this protest concerning all levels of education, it was mostly adults, many children and only some teenagers that were protesting today. Even though CGS professors where granted an absence-free day, which could also have be granted to students if asked for; high schoolers from CGS did not see this protest as one for students Marie Ashworth, 18, a CGS student said. Eleni Mik, 17, Rover Bertels, 17, Maud Blijleven, 17, Aya Essebai, 16, and Cecile de Graaf, 17; high school students at CGS all saw this protest as “more of a teacher thing than a student thing” as Maud said.

Aya Essebai, Cecile de Graaf and Maud Blijleven having free time at school due to the abscence of their teachers.

Furthermore, all these students either organised or participated in both the climate protest in Amsterdam on Thursday 14th of March, as well as in the one on the 7th of February in The Hague. Marie described this climate phenomenon as “a big thing at our school”, for which the school “was kind of forced to make some kind of plan”. This plan was to allow absences for students on that day. A plan that was successful as CGS gave absence free days. Eleni, Rover, Maud, Aya and Cecile all thought that the education protest was an important issue, but that the climate protest “concerns everyone” Maud said, and is thus more of a priority.

One of the many posters for climate activism in the school.

This education crisis in the Netherlands is caused by low numbers of active teachers, low pay and lack of new teachers. These issues led to parents having to fill in for sick teachers as well as extra pressure put on teachers. However, according to a CGS professor who prefered to remain anonymous, this problem is more prominent in primary education. He said that the teachers having gone protesting “mostly do it to support primary education teachers”. He also commented on the students initiative for climate protesting by mentioning that it is “very good that pupils are involved in thinking about the climate”, but that unfortunately, students asked him if he “wanted to go on strike” on Friday only to know if they would have class on that day, and not to know if they could join him or get involved in some way with the protest.

This division in student and teachers protest priorities resulted in the absence of a hundred students on Thursday 14th of March, and the absence of a third of the teachers on Friday 15th of March. Today, some students had very few classes, Cecile for instance had four hours of class instead of eight, which she seemed to enjoy, as she could watch the drawings of the Quarter-finals of the Champions League live.