Met een zoen van de leraar

The Mondriaan high school in Amsterdam was one of the first Dutch secondary schools which deliberately chose to adapt its policy to cater for the increasing influx of pupils from mainly Turkish and Moroccan immigrant families. Their mother tongue is an integral part of the school’s cursus, and the staff are specially trained to teach Dutch as a foreign language. But, in spite of these efforts, results can be disappointing, as bridging the gap between the original culture and the Dutch way of life is no easy task. This question affects more accutely young girls, who are often strongly dependent on their family circle, and is strongly felt, for example, in the numerous discussions about wearing the Islamic headscarf. The filmmaker was herself a teacher at the high school at a time when most of the pupils were Dutch, and she paints a lively portrait of the pupils and her former colleagues. She shows how they cope with the new context in which academic subjects constitute only a part of the work in hand, since the individual attention given to each pupil is on of the teaching staff’s strong points.