| Title |
|
Schoolmeester (Search for the image) |
| Translated title |
Schoolmaster |
| Intro |
Text by dr D. Barnes, accompanying Bramer’s drawing of a schoolmaster (`schoolmeester’) |
| Code of occupational group |
13310 |
| Description |
In a classroom, a bearded schoolmaster, wearing a cap, sits in a chair behind a table with a lectern. The teacher leans forward to hear a young boy recite his lesson. The boy stands at the teacher's desk pointing to words in a book. The schoolmaster clenches a switch of birch rods in his right hand, clearly intimidating the young student. To the left, three other students are seated. One reads a book and watches the exchange between the teacher and student; a second has turned to talk to a student behind him. The wooden writing boxes and leather sheaths for quill pens hang on the wall behind the students. On a wall shelf behind the teacher, a few books are piled in desultory fashion. There is little joy in learning here.
Literacy among the Dutch was the highest in Europe during the 17th century. Most children learned the rudiments of the alphabet either from their parents or from women running infant schools in their homes. Boys went on for further schooling. Some attended Latin schools
so that they could eventually seek admission into either the universities at Leiden, Franeker, Groningen, Harderwijk, and Utrecht or enter into the "illustrious" schools in Dordrecht, Middelburg, Deventer and Amsterdam. Dutch universities enjoyed excellent reputations,
especially for scientific studies in medicine, astronomy, botany, and optics.
But schools for Dutch children were frequently criticized and satirized. Schools were not age- segregated. Children studied with others having roughly the same level of proficiency whatever their age. Individual recitation at the teacher's desk was the major way to ascertain whether young pupils had mastered their lessons. Discipline in school was typically administered by birching, hitting student's hands with a ferule, or humiliating students by forcing them to wear dunce caps and placards spelling out their misdeeds. In Delft, however, the Latin School
rector, Jacob Crucius, who held his post from 1619-1655, was much respected, as was his predecessor, Jacob van der Heyden.
The theme of children in school was treated in Adriaen van Oistade's 1644 etching of the school- master and 1662 painting (Louvre); by Jan Steen's account (c. 1663-65) of "The Village School" where a crying child's hand is hit because he got his lesson wrong (National Gallery of Ireland); and in Philips de Koninck's drawing of "A School in Session" in The Pierpont Morgan Library. Gerrit Dou left images of eager pupils, studying at night by lanterns and candles in evening schools, (see paintings at the Rijksmuseum and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), but most painterly accounts of schoolmasters and pupils were far more critical. |
| Source |
Donna R. Barnes, Ed D, Street scenes, Leonard Bramer's drawings of seventeenth-century daily life (Hofstra Museum exhibition 1991). Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York.
Click here for the introductory essay on Bramer's drawings. |
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