The difference between European school in Luxembourg and Brussels

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European schools system

European schools system is like a never-ending maze of paperwork and bureaucracy.

It’s as if they believe that the more forms you fill out, the smarter you become. Secretary general and deputy secretary general are too busy worrying about their pensions and summer vacations to actually produce anything useful.

It’s a system where children are just tiny cogs in a big bureaucratic machine, and education takes a backseat to administrative tasks.

It’s time for a major overhaul, because right now, the European schools system is about as effective as a chocolate teapot.

No European School in Brussels has any significant advantage over any other European School there, which explains why no actions based on discrimination have been brought there.

To recreate what is happening here in a Brussels context, this is what you would have to do:

  1. Take a European School that has operated effectively for 60 years, on the same site and without vertical split discrimination – a school that has had successful experiments with horizontal division in the past. Then divide that school according to linguistic and residential address criteria, so that one is located exactly beside the EU institutions, perhaps near the Schuman metro, where most of the relevant parents work – this is ‘Brussels I’.
  2. ‘Brussels II’ is located outside of the city in a protected green zone. The relevant land is owned by supporters of the Belgian government. That new Brussels II development is carried out on a Natura 2000 zone without any environmental impact assessment, either before or during construction. The reduced environmental hazards of a horizontal split, which requires less private transporting of young children, are systematically ignored.
  3. This vertical split is carried out at the insistence of the host Member State only and in spite of a veto by Italy. It is carried out in spite of protests by the parents concerned and with the exclusive objective of promoting the private interests of property developers.
  4. EU Commission creche and after-school care facilities for Brussels II are also located at this site outside of the city, in contravention of the Decision of the Member States of 8 April 1965, confirmed in Edinburgh in 1992. They will therefore be of very limited use to the parents for whom they are intended.
  5. The favoured Brussels I school is reserved essentially for Nordic EU workers (who speak Finnish and its neighbouring languages), essentially because the deputy head master and future General Secretary of the Board of Governors is Finnish. The disfavoured Brussels II school is for EU workers from the south east of Europe, most of whom were not represented at the time of the vertical split decision.
  6. A category of ‘vehicular’ children (EN, FR and DE) must then be created to blur the ethnic discrimination. These children are divided into Brussels I and Brussels II according to a discriminatory residential criterion, so that the better off, who can afford to live close to the institutions, can use the Brussels I school. All the rest are assigned to Brussels II.
  7. The local authorities lead the school authorities and the EU authorities and the parents concerned to believe that a flyover and a tunnel will be built to serve the Brussels II school. In fact it is built to serve a cité that is to be built behind the school, the plans for which are concealed until after the school has been opened. This concealed development plan relies on the vertical division of European School school children, to force parents to move to the town-land bordering on the protected green zone outside the city. Those parents, some of whom have already been persuaded and bullied into moving to the out-of-town location, are now a risk of negative equity due to the effect of the concealed development – on top of all the other disadvantages of being assigned to Brussels II. They were advised by the school authorities that they had to move there to make the schooling of their children manageable, which it does not.

This discrimination does not exist in Brussels and would not be accepted there.

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Aim of the European Schools

Educated side by side, untroubled from infancy by divisive prejudices, acquainted with all that is great and good in the different cultures, it will be borne in upon them as they mature that they belong together. Without ceasing to look to their own lands with love and pride, they will become in mind Europeans, schooled and ready to complete and consolidate the work of their fathers before them, to bring into being a united and thriving Europe.

Marcel Decombis, Head of European School, Luxembourg between 1953 and 1960