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wow Here in holland things are more relax. You can even find people smoking joints (outside) during lunchbreaks. Although there was a kid at my school that sold illegal fireworks in lunchbreaks and i tought that went to far, they where avalanche arrows and nitrate bombs, heavy stuff and he had a backpack filled with it. Nobody ever cared though, not even the teacher standing a few meters from him checking whether anything inappropriate was occuring in the halls :). The only time he got into trouble was when he blew up a refrigerator with a nitrate bomb that someone left outside a house near school! The guy who lived there sure was pissed and the kid got punishment from the coordinator: he and his friends had to stay on the 1st floor during lunchbreaks where he couldnt cause trouble, for the duration of a month or so. He probably got of easy cause he delivered illegaly copied software to that coordinator.
Yes Dutch schools sure are different from american. But we weren't taught Heimlich either, unfortunately.

Do you also have school choice in the Netherlands like in Belgium? John Stossel had a special TV program on education and mediocrity in the United States, showing the teachers' union militant resistance to school choice. One thing that Stossel had shown however was that in the Belgian system, the education budget money is not attached to the school (determined by some head count), but to the student, and it was up to the schools to compete for the student. If the parent thinks that a particular school is not doing the teaching job, the parent is free to move the child to another school. Yes, government funding is still involved, but there is still a market mechanism where the parent decides where the child goes.