Education In Limburg, The Netherlands

The Liberal Constitution of 1848 stipulated that church and state should in principle be separated. Partly because of this, there was now a freedom of education. But paradoxically, that same liberal constitution also meant increasing centralization. King William I only had via its provincial governors and local elites into one form of indirect rule, so the Netherlands was governed much more strongly from The Hague.

Educación en Limburgo, Países Bajos

In Limburg, this school legislation made two interrelated but essentially different reactions. One was Catholic. the impetus with which the liberal government regulates public education promoted, met with resistance from the Catholics. There was, however, another discussion in the Provincial Council. In the sixties, the former Member of Parliament P.F.E. van Wintershoven (1822-1899), a separatist from 1848, who later became a Thorbeckian Pine tree. In 1863 he had broken up with Thorbecke, because the second Thorbecke cabinet wanted to bring more unity to the country with a number of centralizing laws, and Van Wintershoven, like many Limburgers, mainly saw the disadvantages of this for Limburg. Van Wintershoven’s proposal to object to the law on behalf of the province was adopted by a vote of 34 to 2. In response to the integration of Limburg into a centralized Netherlands a sense of identity developed in Limburg, of which Catholicism was an important part and in which strangers had to be kept out as much as possible.

Ausbildung in Limburg, Niederlande

Образование в Лимбурге, Нидерланды

Because the Netherlands had the most tolerant laws in Europe with regard to foreigners who wanted to settle, Limburg as a border province became an ideal place of exile for large groups of German clergy. With the arrival of the German orders, the number of monasteries in Limburg doubled to over a hundred, the French orders added more than fifty more. The orders often took their internal training with them. For example, major seminars were held by the Carmelites in Geleen, and by the Franciscans and Jesuits in Bleijerheide. But in many cases these were boarding schools and the pensioners came with them. Suddenly training courses for German and French children came to the Netherlands. Until the Interbellum and beyond, there were therefore a considerable number of boarding schools on Limburg territory, where education was conducted in accordance with German education legislation. The Saint Joseph College of the Franciscans in Watersleyde near Sittard, for example, continued to function as a fully-fledged German college on the basis of the German curriculum until 1967.

Education dans le Limbourg, Pays-Bas

Vista College at Maastricht Aachen Airport (Netherlands)

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التعليم في ليمبورغ ، هولندا

A turning point in the history of secondary education in the Netherlands was Thorbecke’s Secondary Education Act of 1863, which created the HBS. The HBS would strengthen the integration of Limburg into the Netherlands. An example of this is that of the 227 successful HBS-b students of the Sint-Bernardinus college in Heerlen between 1920 and 1937, only 10 percent went on to further education abroad.
The development of the secondary school system in Limburg was broadly as follows: until the 1860s, it mainly concerned the foundation of Catholic secondary education for girls (HBS and MMS). and Catholic (M)ULOs. In addition, Catholic boys’ education was expanded in fast-growing cities such as Maastricht, Heerlen and Venlo. After the Second World War, pre-university education (VWO) also arose in smaller places such as Echt, Brunssum, Geleen, Landgraaf, Kerkrade and Horn, often from large neighboring schools. In the 1960’s educational opportunities were further expanded as the Catholic schools became mixed. Geleen was a pioneer here, where a girl already took the exams at the Roman Catholic HBS in 1949.

荷兰林堡的教育

Edukacja w Limburgii, Holandia

A process of scaling up started from the 1980s. First, MAVOs and VWOs merged to form comprehensive comprehensive schools; from the 1990s onwards, the comprehensive schools merged. For example, the Graaf Huyncollege in Geleen has in fact included all secondary education in Geleen since 1996. An important trend was the development and systematization of vocational education. In the nineteenth century, most attention was paid to general education and vocational education was left to social initiative.
The mining industry played an important role in Limburg. The mining companies lacked well-trained personnel and both the Heerlen Mining School and the Craft Schools in Venlo, Heerlen and Sittard met this need. An MTS was also established in Heerlen in 1922 from the Mining School. In 1957, like all other MTSs in the Netherlands, it would be converted into an HTS. Lower technical education, then called UTS, became MTS from then on.