We live in turbulent times, in which the role of the teacher is also under discussion. Since 2021, the legal obligation for primary and secondary schools to provide citizenship education has been tightened in the Netherlands. Citizenship education aims to shape pupils into citizens who actively participate in society. For Dutch schools today, this means introducing pupils to concepts such as democracy, equality and freedom of speech. Meanwhile, political statements made by teachers are regularly challenged in the media. A prominent example of such discussions is the commotion surrounding the Dutch political party Forum for Democracy's ‘Reporting Leftist Teachers Hotline’ (“Meldpunt Linkse Leraren”) in March 2019. 'This made many teachers feel they were living under a magnifying glass’, says researcher Renée ten Cate, who is also a history teacher.
Discussion in the municipal council
In her PhD research, Ten Cate discovers that such discussions are not a new phenomenon. 'In the 1950s, for example, there was an extensive discussion in the Zaandam municipal council about statements made by a history teacher. He had quoted a text in class saying that the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) did not rise up against the Germans until 1941. Because of their communist ideology, the CPN would have adhered to the course of the Soviet Union, who only sided with the Allied Forces in 1941 because they still had a treaty with Germany until then,' Ten Cate explained. The CPN strongly disagreed with the teacher's statements and the discussion was widely reported in the media. Ten Cate: 'This example shows that there is a lot of political tension involved in how you interpret history in the classroom.'
Old newspaper articles
To explore the role of the teacher as a citizen-maker, Ten Cate delved into Dutch online archives, where she has already discovered thousands of newspaper articles with ideas about teachers and teaching. Using these articles, she aims to map how citizenship education was thought about in the past and how this relates to today. Ten Cate starts her research with the 1950s. 'There was much talk about the concept of citizen-making at the time', the researcher explains. 'On the one hand, citizen-making was about imparting general knowledge about the government, but on the other hand, they also had very idealistic ideas about citizenship: what kind of world view should you have, how should you behave yourself?'
Decency
Teachers do not strike: they are very individualistic, idealistic, decent people. They are also what people in the business world would call ‘unpractical’ and ‘not businesslike’. Due to their profession and character they possess an enormous sense of resilience, otherwise they would not dare to stand in front of about twenty-five pairs of awake, sleepy, sarcastic or unwilling eyes every fifty minutes again and again. Teachers have, in a way, become victims of their own profession, victims of their own large amount of tolerance and patience towards the youth. Being a teacher is a most exhausting, strange and responsible profession. One can get so tired from teaching six times fifty minutes that a manager who worked for eight full hours would feel fit as a fiddle. I speak from my own experience, because once upon a time I was a manager. The amount of overtime can, in times of repetition, be as great or even greater than a company that has too many orders. Excerpt from "The teacher must be satisfied", in: Het Parool (18-05-1959)
In addition to her research on citizenship education in the 1950s, Ten Cate will also delve into newspaper articles from the 1960s to the 1990s over the next four years. The first impressions are already intriguing: the spirit of the times is palpable in the discussions that surface in the newspaper articles, but ideas about how a teacher relates to their pupils appear not to have changed much. ‘I have found many stories that are very recognisable to me as a teacher,' says Ten Cate enthusiastically. ‘That shows that being a teacher is a timeless profession.’
Renée ten Cate is a researcher at the RICH research group Breaking the Mold and history teacher at secondary school Het Rhedens Dieren. Read more about her research: The teacher as a citizen-maker: maneuvering in a complex force field.