The Times Magazine 43The next interior should be made by you and
not what we already have.’ ”
The whole point of school should be to
provoke curiosity, Houben argues, as we walk
through the atrium, where some students
are playing charades. He leads me up the
sweeping metal staircase, past a replica of
the statue of the winged goddess of victory,
Nike, from the Louvre. “It’s about having
the freedom to fly,” he explains. Agora, he
suggests, is framed around discovering pupils’
passions as a way to unlock learning, rather
than simply cramming them with facts. “We
need to put a lot of knowledge in these kids,
but if we attach it to a trigger, then it sticks.”
On the first floor, busts of Hippocrates,
Homer and Socrates are lined up in a row.
“There is nothing wrong with traditional
learning, but we try to put kids in a traditional
learning situation when they are fully open for
it,” Houben says. “We called the school Agora
because in Athens, at the agora, these guys were
talking in the market square and everybody
who wanted to join could join in – everybody
who had an opinion could give their opinion.”
Instead of being divided into classes on the
basis of age, pupils are put into “coach groups”
that span the whole school. “A 13-year-old girl
acts like she’s 16, and a 13-year-old boy acts like
he’s 11,” Houben says. “If you are interested in
something, you should be able to work with
people who are interested as well. If I put you
in an age group, that makes it more difficult...
We prefer a mix of people, so we have kids
from 12 up until 18 in the same room, and kids
from the so-called lowest educational levels
to the highest educational levels. We all know
that there isn’t a highest and lowest level – it’s
just who’s happy and who is not, who wants to
explore and progress.”
In contrast to the disciplinarian regimes that
are favoured by some English schools, pupils
at Agora can choose flexible start and finish
times, signing in and out to suit their schedule
and what they are doing. They all have a
laptop and arrange meetings with experts or
coaches on their Google diaries. There are
no detentions. “We have a simple rule – act
like you would love to be treated by others,”
Houben says. When students misbehave, “We
talk about it and ask, ‘OK, how are you going
to fix the problem?’ To start with they said,
‘Just give me a detention,’ and I said, ‘No,
detention is for stupid people. Start thinking.’ ”
The idea of silent corridors is anathema
to him. “I spend hours sitting in the middleof the atrium just to see how my kids are
doing. If they were not allowed to shout, run
or whatever, how would I know who is happy
and who is not happy? If a child is happy
at school, that means that they will open
up for learning.”
It sounds like a recipe for noisy chaos and
Houben admits that things have not always
gone to plan. Three weeks after the school
opened, the floor was littered with paper from
all the paper aeroplanes that had been thrown.
“We panicked. We spent an hour and a half
making rules like, ‘You are not allowed to
move without asking.’ Then someone said,
‘If everybody was working on something they
loved, would they spend time building a paper
aeroplane?’ Our conclusion was they wouldn’t.
So we took our 60 students and made a list- the annoying ones on the top, because the
annoying ones were only annoying because
we didn’t know what they loved. As soon as
we know what they love, we can encourage
them with that. Then I don’t have to police
them any more. And that’s what you see here.”
As we walk around the school, the
atmosphere is calm and quiet. Students are
getting on with their projects, occasionally
asking for advice from one of the adults sitting
dotted around on sofas. In the inventions
room, children are building vast contraptions
out of Lego. In the common room, there
is a washing line hung with screen-printed
baby clothes. Photographs and plants are
dotted around. Don’t the kids get distracted?
“Of course,” Houben replies. “You would
get distracted. The question is, how do
you analyse that and what do you do?
If we don’t get this right now, how will
they cope afterwards?” He says that is why
pupils are also allowed to use their mobile
phones in school. “In my opinion, secondary
education should be about preparing you to
stand up in the world.”
It’s not a total free-for-all. Agora covers
all the elements of the compulsory Dutch
curriculum and in their last two years students
are taught by subject experts to prepare them
for national exams.
The projects are carefully managed by the
coaches who ensure that there are educational
elements woven through even the most
apparently fun-filled plan. “If a kid tellsPupils (from left) Calista Long, 16, Lobke Pollen, 16, and Lisz Geurts, 13Rob Houben, the manager of the school‘IT’S NOT HIGH OR
LOW EDUCATIONAL
LEVELS – IT’S JUST
WHO’S HAPPY, WHO
WANTS TO PROGRESS’