Yay! Finals are done!
This week marked the end of my schooling in the Netherlands. Two weeks ago was my final week of classes, last week I was in Rome with a class, and this week was finals week. Submitting final drafts of excruciatingly long papers and pouring through painful amounts of notes for my exams made me reflect on the semester. While the semester flew by extremely quickly, it seems like I've been going to school here for a really long time. In fact, some of my notes seemed to be from so long ago, I didn't even remember writing them.
The exams all took place in a building so orange inside that it seemed to glow. Several lectures full of people from various classes filtered into rooms that seemed to be the size of football fields full of desks. Apparently it is also standard to pack a lunch in case you get hungry in the middle of your three hour exam. At least that's what I found out when the guy taking a Spanish test next to me pulled out a sandwich in the middle of the time period.
The whole philosophy of education seems to be a bit different here. A lot of people seem content with merely passing their classes. It's obviously not true for everybody, but a few of the people I talked to before the exams were only concerned with what it took to get a passing grade in the class. If all else fails, there's always the chance to get a resit on the exams, which many people take.
I have mixed feelings about this approach. Granted, I have been shaped by the type of education that I have grown up accustomed to, but I have never seen the draw of just doing enough to get by. My education has always been dictated by the mindset of doing your best and achieving the most possible. Of course, that is one of the reason that we have so much more stress in our education system, as well as competition. People drive themselves to achieve as much as possible and to beat others. On the other hand, this also means that more people are working up to their potential.
Here though, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much stress. Really high marks are deemed practically unobtainable, or for super-humans, and passing, or doing fairly well, is often sufficient enough. Maybe that's part of the reason that the Dutch have been found to be some of the happiest people in the world. Their system seems to put a lot less pressure on people and results in more relaxed attitudes towards these sorts of things. Of course, the fact that the government also helps pay for a lot of the education at the university level probably helps quite a bit too. If people weren't automatically going to be in a ton of debt going to school, they might feel a bit less pressure to be the best as well.
It might sound crazy to say that trying to be your best isn't always necessarily a good thing. But I think that that's only because that's what our system has taught us our entire life. Is it a bad thing to not let some insignificant things in the big scheme of things dictate your life? Would society as a whole be less successful if people weren't so driven and determined to be the best? Maybe by material standards. But I still think there's something to be said for the easy-going lifestyle that ranks so high on the happiness scale of the world.
