Schools during my childhood were places where quietness in classrooms, disciplined order, and endless drilling were paramount. When you didn’t hold a pen in your hand, your arms were crossed across your chest. To make an impression on a teacher, you sat up as straight as possible, crossed your arms as high as you possibly could, and pulled in your chin. Now, that was a fine pupil! Uncrossing your arms and taking up a book or a pen (which had to be dipped in an ink pot every three words you wrote) was only done on the teacher’s command.

Exercise books were treasures which you handled with awe. Penmanship was a separate lesson, and so adamant was the quest for beauty and neatness, that almost all pupils did indeed write -very well. One of the greatest disasters was when you had too much ink on your ‘crown’ pen and a blotch would occur on a virgin page. You’d get punished for that, and the pleasure of owning a clean, beautiful exercise book was gone until it was full, and you got a new one. Endless rows of sums had to be jotted down in your arithmetic exercise books.

Precision was the key word. Not only should the answers be right, it was equally important that spacing your sums was done meticulously … like: one centimeter between each sum, and the numbers of additions or subtractions written exactly underneath each other. We had a sloppy book and a neat exercise book. The neat book could only be used when you understood the problems, when you were able to jot them down in expert fashion. These books were meant for the school inspectors, and I believe that the qualifications of a good teacher were judged solely on the beauty of these exercise books. Every page was checked over by the teacher and received a mark, neatly written with red ink!

The quality of education depended for a great deal on endless repetition. The best classroom was the one where students were always bent over their neat or sloppy books, tongues pressed between lips, eyes frowning in utmost concentration, or cross-armed students listening to Bible or History stories, sitting ramrod straight in their desks. No free drawing was allowed … you copied stylized, simple pictures. And so, the free spirit of the 5-year-olds, their make-believe and creativity came to an end, to make room for discipline, drill and neatness.

And oh, how proud a teacher was when her/his class could sing in two or three parts after endless drilling. It really didn’t matter that half of the class never learned a beautiful soprano melody and had to content themselves with a monotonous alto part. The learning of melodies was done by rote, since sight-reading wasn’t exactly a skill most teachers acquired. Music notes only began to make sense to me when I started to take organ lessons when I was ten.

That’s not to say that all was bad in these halls of learning. Although creativity was killed, we benefitted from discipline and neatness – two items which can make life somewhat easier later on. And when we emigrated to Canada, we noticed that Canadians used pen and paper to do even the easiest additions, subtractions and multiplications, while we could do these things in our head much faster. How proud we were! … not realizing that only a decade later all our skills were made superfluous by the little calculators.

Many Dutch teachers understood the art of storytelling. We gathered most of our information from the lips of teachers, for history and geography books only gave a minimum of info. It is amazing how much you retain from a story told well…

But even then, some teachers had discipline problems in their classrooms. In the fourth grade, my teacher was Mr. Hazelberg. He was a fine storyteller and when he got around to the famous sea battles between the English and Dutch fleets, we literally saw ships sailing through the isles between our desks. But this teacher had problems when he wasn’t telling stories. He just couldn’t manage to keep us working without making a peep. Maybe he was too nervous, too insecure himself.

One morning he chased a rascal of a boy through the isles and wasn’t able to get him by the scruff of his neck. The boy shouted: you can’t get me; you can’t get me! I was astounded at his nerve, never would I dare to do such a thing, for behold: I was shy, scared and very obedient! The teacher left the classroom and when I peeked out of the hall window, I saw him banging his head against the wall.

Before long Hazelberg became an in-and-out patient of the Psychiatric Hospital. The principal of the school came to our class and told us that all of us had messed up Mr. Hazelberg’s life. We felt so guilty!