A stately school building is located between the estates of Velm in Limburg. You reach it along a lovely sunken road with antique cobblestones. That road alone appeals to the imagination. You can, following the old cart quarries in the deep black shiny bluestone, soak up the history, imagine the highwaymen who once hung around there, imagine how the steam locomotives rumbled past the nearby old station building, how Dutch musketeers marched in long convoys to a little further, on the plain of Neerwinden, to fight an important battle against the army of Louis XIV – to defeat. Even without Tom Waes, this place shares its history.
The building itself is a story, a story about how form, rhythm and harmony play on the human mind, with high fences, a wide court of honor, winged buildings that beckon the visitor in like arms to come face to face with the towering facade of the main building and to climb the stairs with some trepidation. “Visitor, be welcome and respectful.” There is also the story of labour, craftsmanship and natural wealth. “This we, human hands, have made for you.” The cleat stones formed with the heavy Haspengouw loam, the corner stones hewn and bush-hammered from Maasland limestone, the floors laid in local marble with coquettish names like flanders red in imperial.
We are therefore only standing in the reception hall and have already completed a small journey of discovery in history, aesthetics and geology. And then the garden doors open onto a beautiful lawn, which opens onto meadows where cows graze, which are flanked by a small orchard, on a standard tree, and which are partly enclosed by majestic oaks, ash, beech and lime trees in which the thrush in the spring sings, in which tits are their restless selves and in which the buzzard nests, a lawn that invites you to run and romp, to explore, to observe how the farmer plows his land, where the milk comes from, the sugar, our bread , things that seem so normal, but are not quite so.
Flashing SUV’s
So all that is a school and that school is now being sold, probably to a developer, who will turn it into an expensive hotel or a real estate millionaire who will only reopen the wrought iron gates to the shiny SUVs of a handful of wealthy friends, lazy for whom it what matters is the status of the castle and not the history, who in expensive white sneakers will lament that the cow moans, the stable smells and the farmer carries manure to his land, lazy for whom having is more important than discovering . This is increasingly happening in our society: due to a lack of imagination, willpower and pride, so much beauty is taken away from the community and left to a handful of people with a lot of money.
The people from the education umbrella have of course already finished their talk. The buildings are no longer of this time. They are no longer user-friendly. They are not properly unlocked. They are not energy friendly. That’s how it is in our education today, the education run by bookkeepers for whom students are income and market share, technocrats who have typically spent as little time in their lives in a real classroom as a multinational executive on a factory floor, people who have their mouths full of social mission, but for whom it ultimately has to be mainly pragmatic, because after all: the means justifies the end.
In their place I would have fought my way to keep those castles, made them the finest schools for craftsmen, cooks, hoteliers and farmers: to show that learning craftsmanship can be great, that manual labor is more uplifting than hanging without inspiration in auditoriums. The Oxford and Cambridge of out-of-school care, although perhaps we shouldn’t even call the latter that anymore. Joiners, plumbers and roofers today are sometimes more sophisticated than many highly trained screen watchers. Chance lost: the castle is for sale Sotheby’s Reality as luxury real estate. And then they create their own oversupply, by throwing a whole bunch of castles on the market at once, sometimes only a few kilometers apart. What amateurism. Too bad the Russian oligarchs can’t bid this time.
Everything for the car
It is all characteristic of our society. In fact, they simply invest too little in school buildings. Our country spends a meager 5 percent of education expenditure on infrastructure. In most North-Western European countries this fluctuates around 10 percent. It leads to distressing conditions. My daughters attended a primary school for several years where the playground seemed to have been hit by a Russian artillery barrage. As soon as it rained, the entire cracked concrete plain was flooded. The tiny shelter kept the head dry, but the feet stayed wet just as much, especially for the poor people who had to do with the same worn-out sports shoes all year round. While the school principal banged on every door that could be banged on to scrape together a few pennies, the adjacent supermarket got a brand new parking lot, with gardens and trees. Everything for the car.
Things aren’t much better at their new school. Children avoid the toilets because they keep overflowing. Despite the hard work of the cleaning crew, they invariably turn into a filthy and smelly mess. It was a choice between artificial grass for the playground and sanitary facilities, you hear apologetically. And if they were to continue their studies later, go to university, it wouldn’t necessarily get any better. What does that say about our society, about us parents, that we allow our children to spend years in those caverns? We can discuss education finances for a long time, but one thing is clear: we spend too little on schools. Public-private solutions are expensive and bring no solace. I once heard a developer boast that he made a 30 percent profit building schools—in schools!
Wineries
Schools are decisive. They are the stone exterior of our vision of education, of upbringing and of the coming generation. Many schools resemble a prison, literally. Children need space and greenery. Due to the limited resources, schools are increasingly obliged to sell part of their land and use the proceeds to add a new piece of koterij to their bursting patrimony. Research indicates that there should be 25 square meters per child; with us the standard is 4 to 10 square meters. In many designs for new schools, you see playgrounds timidly hidden between concrete, they are languishing. The only place students have to play is their smartphone. Well, that is perhaps also a form of smart school.
It’s as if all this architecture is aimed at making young people go nuts, as if architects get a percentage of the Ritalin sales. Oh, how I long for the harmony, simplicity, composure and symmetry of the school in Velm at the sight of those hyperkinetic new buildings, those angular boils, those vertical breeding lofts with their strange bulges and messy windows. It’s a matter of taste, perhaps, but I do know where I’d like to be as a curious, energetic teenager, or where I’d send my kids. Maybe we should create a new net, around some old values, in dignified buildings, buildings that whisper instead of shout, buildings that tell my children as a young citizen: we built this beauty for you, take care of it and continue to build our future.
