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De schoolstrijd (The School Struggle)

Article 17 of the Belgian 1831 constitution deals with freedom of education. The article stipulates on the one hand that everyone is free to set up a school on the basis of their own philosophy of life and own pedagogical project and on the other, that parents have the right to enrol their children in a school of their choice. This freedom contributed to the so-called ‘verzuiling’ (pilarisation or compartmentalisation) of the new Belgian state. The totality of life – from education and youth movement, to politics and care – was organised within one’s own philosophy of life, e.g. liberal, Catholic or socialist. People grew up in largely separate, monocultural ‘pillars’. At various moments in the history of Belgium, battles erupted between these ‘pillars’, in which the grip on youth, through education, was an important point of contention.

In the 19th century, the first School Struggle between Catholics who dominated so-called ‘free’ education (‘vrij onderwijs’) and liberals, who favoured a stronger state education (‘officieel onderwijs’), was mainly about primary education. As more and more young people received secondary education after WWII, in the 1950s, the latter became the focus of the second school struggle. The main protagonists were Catholic Minister of Public Education Pierre Harmel, who ensured that, for the first time, ‘free’ secondary education could receive subsidies from the state, and his successor, the socialist Leo Collard, who scaled down these subsidies, among other things. At the height of the struggle, in the mid-1950s, massive demonstrations were organised, some ‘liberal’ products like Tiense Suikerraffinaderij sugar were boycotted, and in the – ‘pilarised’ – media especially Collard was portrayed as a devil. The 1958 School pact was a compromise between the various parties and it democratised Belgian education. Since then, there has been a relative School peace in Belgium.

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