Are schools better of without grades?

Education is a hot topic in Flanders these days. Not a month passes without a discussion linked to education.  In the last months we had heated discussions about the use of home language by pupils at school, panic after a disturbing report on the degenerating reading skills of Flemish children at the age of ten and fierce debates on whether or not to use class averages. In this blog I want to elaborate on this last discussion. I am myself a ‘product’ of a school system that graded and tested. So I want to find out if I would have fitted better in  a system without grades and tests.

Changing World, Angry Men?

 

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Extreme right voting is on the rise these days. For some a sign of change, for others like myself a reason for concern. Recently, Sebastian Kurz from Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) won the Austrian elections with a discourse that is very near to the discourse of the radical right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which became the second party. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), clearly a far-right party, became third in the last elections.  With every new victory of far-right parties,  discussions about who the voters of these parties are and why they vote for them, emerge.

Well, who are they, these voters? Are far-right voters men? According to the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) 7 in 10 supporters of AfD are men. Research (Immerzeel, Coffe, & van der Lippe, 2015) in 12 European countries shows us that men are indeed much more likely to vote for radical right parties. But, although researchers agree on the gender gap, some warn us not to underestimate the fact that a large minority of the voters of these parties are women…despite the very conservative ideas about gender these parties usually stand for.