Put 15 or so bouncy balls from the first grade of primary VMBO in an antique cabin of a few square metres and you can be sure there will be a hundred of them. Music they will make and they themselves had thought it should be about a forest. That's what the supervisor of Protoon arrange for them. There are pads ready, there are drumsticks, the children may make their self-devised sounds on the theme of 'forest' Sampling. The fact that the boys in particular quite often come up with wood on wood and call it 'wood' is only a minor problem: next time, call it 'tree'. The pro-tone employee is patient until it runs out. She manages to get them back on track with a few stern admonitions.
That any kind of order, let alone music, could emerge from this chaos seems unthinkable. Yet it happens, 15 minutes later, and the kids themselves are most quiet about it. They have learned that working together and listening to each other can produce beautiful things. Welcome to the new education. No textbook can compete with this.
3,600 schoolchildren
The venue is the cabin of the Verhalenboot, this past week the beating heart of Festival Woest, which largely takes place in tents and among straw bales on Zwolle's historic Pelserkade. The area, between the premises of the Librije and the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, is also the venue for Zwolle Unlimited every year. Woest hooks up with this festival and shares the venues. But where Unlimited is a busy festival for storytelling in the broadest sense of the word, Woest is all about education, and what art has to offer that education. That turns out to be quite a lot.
Over five days, 3,600 secondary school students visit the venue. Not entirely voluntarily, schools in Zwolle and the surrounding area use the festival to fill in part of their creative subject hours. Yet there is absolutely no educational atmosphere on the quay: it seems more like a pleasantly deranged sanctuary where children can decide for themselves for a few days what they want to learn and how they want to do it. Villa Kakelbont in Zwolle. All it lacks is a very strong girl with straight tails. Although that turns out to be present later. Sort of.
Carton City
In a large yurt at the beginning of the festival grounds, boy is busy demolishing a hard drive with sturdy tools. This is because the enclosure is to become something on the roof of the building he is building with his classmates. What exactly it should be is not yet entirely clear, but it is going to be part of Cardboard City. The outlines of this cardboard city will become visible on the floor of this huge tent.
Cardboard City is an initiative by artist Coen Bouwstra: 'I put together this workshop with a number of students and was helped by students from the college's teacher training programme. I make models myself and photograph them to use as illustrations for children's books. I thought it would be a nice idea to use that building in a workshop for Woest as well. So we came up with the idea that it should be about building the Zwolle of the future. We did stipulate that a few buildings had to remain absolute, such as the Peperbus. So now we are making buildings out of cardboard boxes. We have a chill spot, a station. There was first the assignment to make a building, and during the process we then give additional assignments, such as: it has to be movable, or it has to be weatherproof. That works well.'
Without bullying
This year's theme is 'The Man at Play', and it goes a long way. In the evening programme Marco Mout on. The broad-shouldered Rotterdam native changed tack a few years ago when he arrived in New Zealand as a world cyclist and saw how at a school there, all classes and all learning levels sat together in one room. 'What was the most striking thing I discovered?" he asks to a tent full of education professionals and administrators: 'There was no bullying there. Bullying didn't exist in that school because the different age groups kept each other on track.'
This gave him the insight that children know very well what is good for them, without adults asserting power over them. Back in the Netherlands, he founded Walhallab, which is best described as a fablab for schoolchildren. Here you can fully indulge in technical stuff, from 3D printers to plastic power tube, twigs and gaffer tape.
To demonstrate how it works, he has divided the adult audience into groups and provides each of them with a mystery box. With that, they have to go outside and are given half an hour to do 'something' with it. What follows is astonishing. The neat adults pounce on the suitcases and get inspired by each other and the surroundings, and the contents of the suitcases. There are all different contents in them. There is even one suitcase with 40 kilograms of lead. Which makes for some surprises.
Minister enthusiastic
After half an hour in which an unprecedented wave of creative energy swept over visitors to the festival site, the participants show the result back in the tent. It is moving. People are proud, their playing selves are awake again, and the debate afterwards is actually unnecessary. Even the alderman in attendance cannot help but acknowledge what earlier Education Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven also had to admit: when you give so much space to creativity in education, so many subjects become so much more fun.
The minister made her discovery when she saw the Teachers College attended the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Zwolle. That college, unique in the world and in operation for only four years, proved to be a major inspiration for the creators of Festival Woest. The Teachers College aims to bring a new kind of primary and secondary school teacher into the world. A teacher who loves to experiment, who is more of a facilitator of students' creative process than someone who imposes lesson material from above. So they call their trainee teachers 'teacher artists'. I speak to about four of them on the festival grounds and what they say is definitely inspiring.
Fibonacci
'Children themselves know very well what they want to learn and how. For that, there is no need to teach them right away that you have to colour within the lines,' says one of them. 'Even maths can be taught with a creative approach. How do you calculate an angle? You can do that on paper and with a geodesic, but you can also walk in a forest and look at trees and branches and see how angles have a function there.' And that makes pretty good sense: the famous fibonacci series, which depicts how leaves and branches are attached to a trunk, was after all also discovered by looking at nature and not the other way around.
So much inspiration, it's almost overwhelming. You would almost forget that there are also just kids who want to dance, act or play music. For them, there is a place in the evening programme. It is a tightly composed medley of young talent, from a tight drummer to overwhelmingly beautiful close harmony. And then, of course, that heartbreakingly moving song by that one girl with her guitar. She could be a big one yet. The Pipi Longstocking of music. Pip Blom's successor is now at school in Zwolle.
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