On 17 November the Dutch government launched a website, www.onderwijs2032.nl, with the purpose to start a national dialogue on the future of education in The Netherlands.
How do Dutch citizens want their education system to work in the near future? Now is their chance to engage in a public debate on the education system and its contents, instead of having to listen to the same old one-liners of politicians.
The Dutch government was inspired by similar projects in Finland, Norway and Scotland. The Dutch State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science, Sander Dekker, even went to Scotland to find out how the project was run over there and what the results were. One might call it a learning trip.
It looks like the Dutch political landscape is starting to change. Citizens are invited and given permission to contribute to the policymaking process outside of the normal election times. Politics is getting a welcome intellectual boost from the ground up, by its own citizens, supported by the national government. A constructive move forward for the democratic process in the 21st century.
The mentioned website works as a social hub, all messages which are placed by people on social media under #Onderwijs2032 will be collected and displayed at the website.
Everyone with ideas on education can share those via #Onderwijs2032 on social media. Since it is an open source platform via the internet, people everywhere in the world can participate. The brainstorm phase will finish at the end of January 2015. So, if you would like to share your inspirational input with the Dutch public and government make sure to do it in time. I am sharing my input for the website via my Twitter-account (see the picture below this blog).
The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in the second phase of this project, after January 2015, will make a first basic concept of the ideas shared via social media. This so called 'direction document' will be used to start a dialogue with schools, students, teachers, parents and others with a heart for education.
The goal is to have an education policy document in 2017 (phase 3). Mind you, the next planned national election in The Netherlands will be in March of 2017, in which parties can show what they will and will not do with the ideas proposed by their citizens.
What I like about this project is that all people are invited to share what is important to them. One is allowed to dream and shape their own ideal education system to be shared with rest of the country.
It is also an opportunity for every education expert to share their knowledge and experience openly in a public debate without content interference by policymakers.
Another benefit is that everything is shared on an open and public platform, so the stuff you put there could inspire others. Documents, videos, blogs, reports and other sources which would take me ages to collect, are now made accessible by the masses.
The downside is that if a lot of information is shared, one might miss the important material, because the volume of the data is to much to consume. Therefore an objective and transparent curation of the data by the national government is very important.
In the end the 'direction document' made by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will determine the debate to be held in phase 2. As curator of the project the Ministry decides what is important for them to collect in this document. One might be skeptical of that. The selection of the material frames the debate to come. We, the Dutch citizens, will have to wait and see how that works out, and where and when necessary point out to our politicians where we disagree with the selected material for the 'direction document'.
It is my believe that the problem is not that there aren't great ideas, but the problem is how to build the environment in which they can flourish. How we can strengthen the intellectual, constructive and creative input into the democratic process. How to create a culture of engagement and creativity.
I am encouraged by #Onderwijs2032 under taken by the Dutch government and the initiative of the British RSA (#PowertoCreate, about which I have written in my previous Huffington Post blogs) as first small steps to enabling the collective intelligence we have in society by creating an open and interactive public online platform on public subjects.
Often we focus our attention, rightly so, on the corruptive influences of money and power on the political process. The solution might easier than one would have expected. Invest in the power of the people by investing in our collective, creative and critical intelligence.
