A Brill Calendar: June 21

Few Dutch Government decisions had such enormous consequences for the country as the creation of a brand-new type of school.

The ‘Hogere Burgerschool’ HBS (1863); was an initiative of Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798 – 1872), realised during the second national cabinet he chaired.

It was designed to endow youngsters with a comprehensive secondary education, serving the nation with an educational vehicle to prepare for technical, economical and administrative professions. Absence on the curriculum of Latin & Greek implied a momentous break with tradition and the time-honoured Latin school, the ‘Gymnasium’. Only after 1917 a HBS diploma gave access to a University education.

The transition implied by this revolution in the educational system is illustrated by the career of Willem Hendrik Keesom (Texel, June 21 1876 – Leyden, March 4 1956), attending in his high-school days the HBS at Alkmaar on the Holland peninsula. When – at Leyden’s renowned cryogenics laboratory – he became world-famous in 1926 as the first scientist to turn the rare gas Helium into a solid, Keesom had experienced in person all the barriers bureaucratic admission procedures could throw up to protect ‘Almae Matres’ from under-qualified children. Keesom was eventually appointed successor in 1923 of the Nobel-Prize winning Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who had liquefied Helium. It is seldom that a fine scientist had to wait so long for a proper position. Keesom was then – ‘ceteris paribus’ – none of the youngest anymore; with a Gymnasium diploma his life would have been much easier.

Yet, by far the greatest part of the intellectual Great and the Good in The Netherlands in the early twentieth century had attended the Hogere Burgerschool. It caused a shift in social stratification, alongside an expansion of the number of candidates for academic study. Thorbecke’s revision of the Dutch Constitution (1848) remains his main contribution to modernization of the Netherlands; his role in education is almost as important.