Page 135 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

DUTCH COOPERATION SCHOOLS AS DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITIES
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. (Dewey 1897, 2/3)
1. Introduction
Cooperation schools in the Netherlands are a unique type, resulting from a merger
between a public school and a non-government school. Especially in those areas
of the Netherlands where the number of children is decreasing, schools are likely 6 to merge or consider merging (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2016, 2017). In the
last decade, there has been an increase in the number of cooperation schools. The
core concept of this system is the existence of both public and non-government
schools that are equally financed by the government. A public school is religiously
neutral and approaches religious differences actively. A non-government school
is almost always a school that is driven by confessional values (Renkema, Mulder
and Barnard 2016; 2017).
Current discussions about this trend in politics, in school boards and in teams of teachers indicate that cooperation schools are dealt with in ways that are both delicate and ambitious. We will elaborate on two challenges of schools in modern society and the unique position of cooperation schools concerning these challenges. In describing the position of cooperation schools, we will refer to the empirical findings of our previous research.
First, many schools deal with the challenge of creating a commonality between school values as interpreted by teachers, students, parents and formal documents, on the one side, and the practice of education, on the other side. Therefore, a focused attention on these values and the relation between these values and educational practice is necessary. In both public and non-government schools teachers “are hardly aware of the formal identity of the school” (Bakker and Ter Avest 2014, 411) or “of the relation of their pedagogical strategies to the school’s identity” (Bakker and Ter Avest 2014, 411). Especially in classrooms where diversity is apparent, there is a “discrepancy between the official identity of the school as it is formulated in official documents, and every day practice” (Ter Avest et al. 2007, 250).
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