‘This deserves a Golden Televizier Ring’

January 12, 2021

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Yunuscan, one of the kids from Klassen (Image: Human)

The documentary series Classes van Ester Gould and Sarah Sylbing is done. After the last broadcast, the makers and documented children received a digital standing ovation from all viewers. “This deserves a Golden Televizier Ring.”

Gould and Sylbing followed for the series children in group 8 from different primary schools in Amsterdam-Noord. This place was chosen, because nowhere in the Netherlands you will find such a diversity of backgrounds and ethnicities. Central to the Human documentary is the advice for high school, in which one child struggles with pressure to perform and the other with his home situation. In short, late Classes see that the environment in which a child grows up determines the future and that it is hardly possible to avoid it.

Classes are more than just failing educational systems

But Classes is more than a painful documentation of inequality and failing education systems. Gould and Sylbing have made you love the kids. The clever Anyssa, who can easily take high school, but has too many worries because of her home situation and her grandfather as best friend. 13-year-old Gianny, who, despite a high CITO score, is sent to VMBO and gets into trouble on the street. The endearing and clever Yunuscan, who wants so badly, but has to do it all by himself. And then there were the children from yuppie neighborhoods, for whom all the advice under VWO seemed to mean the end of the world.

One liked Classes too painful a confirmation of reality and could not actually look at it. Others devoured the episodes as if it were a Netflix series. Everyone sympathized with the children and few viewers will have kept it dry all the time. Where failing educational systems were exposed in the documentary, the irreplaceable forces also surfaced. Some teachers just get it, you don’t learn that on a course.