JANNIE TUIN, PRINCIPAL: OK. Every morning we open the door and we shake hands to all the children. There are some 200 hands I shake, so let's start.
At the JP Coen School in Amsterdam, principal Jannie Tuin believes that greeting each child individually is the best start to the school day. To an overseas visitor there's something else unusual about this school. Although it's the local primary school, not one of the kids is ethnically Dutch.
JANNIE TUIN: In Holland, you call it a black school. We don't like the word so much but they call it a black school, only children from foreign countries. Ten years ago we had some Dutch children - a group of Dutch children in the school - and then they learned better Dutch and now it's a real problem that the school, there are only foreign children.
In a multicultural city like Amsterdam, it's not surprising to find schools with a high percentage of non-Dutch children. But what is unique is the almost complete segregation of the entire school system along racial lines. Just 15 minutes drive away, in the very centre of Amsterdam, in a well to do suburb, students rehearse in English as well as Dutch. Here, the Dutch clearly hold an ethnic majority. It's what they call around here, a white school.
RUUD KOEPENS, SOCIOLOGIST: Most of the schools in a city like Amsterdam tend to be either predominantly black or predominantly white, 'black' meaning in the Dutch context not necessarily skin colour but simply non-Dutch descent, so a Turk for instance is seen as black in that context although most are rather white skin colour like you and me.
Ruud Koepens is a sociologist whose views on Dutch multiculturalism have often got him into trouble. He accuses his countrymen of allowing an apartheid-style school system to emerge.
RUUD KOEPENS: If that is the actual practice in Dutch society, then it is very reminiscent of apartheid in a way. It's this whole system in the Netherlands, of stimulating segregated institutions if it is combined with social inequality, well then, to some extent, it becomes an apartheid system.
ZEKI ARSLAN, ACTIVIST (Translation): Apartheid here wasn't initiated by the government. I call it "Unintentional Apartheid".
Zeki Arslan is a Turkish-born education activist. He agrees that Holland is becoming increasingly divided along racial lines.
ZEKI ARSLAN, (Translation): I see it as a great problem for Dutch society in the next ten years. For Amsterdam and Rotterdam it's probably too late already.
An incredible influx of migrants over the last generation has skewed the population balance. Already, 50% of school-age kids in Amsterdam are from migrant backgrounds. The numbers have overwhelmed schools in poorer suburbs and the white parents have moved their kids to white schools. In Holland, they call it white flight.
ZEKI ARSLAN (Translation): So this high concentration has created new problems like the formation of black only or white only schools, a problem that no one knows how to solve at the moment.
Within five years, more than half the residents of Holland's four biggest cities will be of foreign origin. Muiderpoort is just a few minutes drive from Amsterdam's centre but here native Dutch people are few and far between. It's a melting pot of mainly Moroccan and Turkish immigrants who've formed an almost exclusively ethnic community. In other words, a non-white ghetto.
ZEKI ARSLAN (Translation): In a way it's nice to end up in an area like this, but at the same time it causes new problems, especially for young children who should be coming into contact with the Dutch language and going to school with Dutch-speaking children.
The sheer size of the migrant population has driven the segregation of the suburbs and the school system. The fear is that a divided society entrenches the disadvantage of migrants and fuels anger from native Dutch that their culture is being swamped. It has become the hot issue in Dutch politics.
ERIC BALEMANS, DUTCH LIBERAL PARTY: You can't talk through these issues. If you look at the birth rate in the Netherlands you see that people who are originally Dutch, have an average 1.3 children. The Muslim society in this country, has an average of 5, 6 children, which means that there will be a shift in society.
Eric Balemans is the education spokesman for the Dutch Liberal party part of the ruling coalition in the Netherlands. He says the shift in society is so profound that the previous policy of multiculturalism must be questioned.
ERIC BALEMANS: My predecessors had the idea that a multicultural society would be to the benefit of all, and what we now can conclude, it failed completely.
TEACHER (Translation): Roy, you've been sick for a long time so you've missed a few pages. You need to do pages 9 and 10 but not all the questions.
Despite adequate funding and all the facilities of the state system, children in black schools are slow to progress and many fail to achieve a satisfactory higher education. Dutch parents have moved their kids to white schools for their better academic results. But for those Dutch parents too poor to move, it's led to resentment about the impact of immigrants on the school environment.
DORIEN FLIERVOET, SINGLE MUM: It irritates me too when I go to this school when you have mothers who talk in their own language to each other. Actually it irritates me because I think it's a bit impolite also because I can't talk with them, I can't hear what they say and I would like that they tried, or even just talked Dutch.
Dorien Fliervoet is a single mother in an ethnic neighbourhood. She can't afford to pay for a private education so she's been forced to send her young daughter to the local, black school and she's worried about how this will affect her child's education.
DORIEN FLIERVOET: Sometimes they say about those people, the Moroccan families, that they leave their children out on the streets and they don't care and there's not much education around, they're educated by grandmother or grandfather, so that concerns me a bit then, yeah.
Even the teachers at black schools say the children's poor academic performance is related to foreigners' willingness to learn Dutch.
JANNIE TUIN: We've really gone out of our way here in Holland to accommodate the influx of foreigners into this country. We're now saying "You're living here, we expect you to make an effort to fit in." This includes learning the Dutch language. We can't have people living here for 30 years who don't speak Dutch.
In black schools, all the education - even the puppet shows - are in Dutch. In multicultural Holland, it's surprising in this show from Dutch folklore to find a character called Black Pete - said to be a Moorish slave helper to St Nicholas. But Holland is changing. The migrant influx and the segregated schools are driving a policy change from the current governing right-wing coalition.
ERIC BALEMANS: It started with the parents who came here who didn't want to accept the values of the Dutch society, and it continues when you send the second or third generation to school. If they don't want to accept our values and find a way in our society, then it is actually the origin of future problems.
AMAL FAKHOR (Translation): Holland is a nice country, but lately it hasn't been so good. There are different opinions about migrants. Some tend to be more tolerant than others.
Amal is a Moroccan immigrant with two children in a black school. She says the debate about integration and accepting Dutch culture should be a two-way street.
AMAL FAKHOR (Translation): We're told "Learn Dutch so you can understand us” we hear that all the time “ Learn Dutch really well, get to know our culture”, But they forget that they should understand our culture. We can’t live together if you don’t understand me. It’s not enough if I understand you but you don’t understand me. Multiculturalism means that you understand me, and I understand you.
But the pleas for understanding from migrants are not finding political support. Instead, the political rhetoric is hardening.
ERIC BALEMANS: If you look back in the last 20, 25 years, we've tried to cover up all the problems we had with immigrants, all the problems we had in the educational system with youngsters from another origin and that covering-up actually made the situation worse.
At the exclusive Montessori white high school in Amsterdam, students debate the finer points of Dutch literature.
BOY (Translation):"He can't know what the animals feel.
TEACHER (Translation): No, but we can try.
BOY (Translation): But mice are a low form of life, you couldn't tell. You can't say they're feeling this or that.
TEACHER (Translation): You don't know.
There's more than 1,000 children at this school but hardly any foreign-born teenagers. This is where privileged white parents send their kids. It's certainly a liberal environment. The students are even allowed to smoke in the playground. But with special entrance exams and high fees, migrant kids have been left out of the equation. But here, the traditional rhetoric of tolerance still prevails even if the practice argues otherwise.
REPORTER: Black and white schools - you don't like the term?
FERD STOUTEN, PRINCIPAL: No, absolutely not.
REPORTER: Why not?
FERD STOUTEN: Why not? Because nothing has to do with colour of skin or eyes or whatever, just - schools have to deal with education and they should make a good program for the children. Each of these small schools have there own room where they can study. And about 30%-40% of the time the children choose themselves for which subject they are going to work at.
Ferd Stouten makes no apologies about the fact that his school is almost exclusively white. He sees it as just a matter of time before migrant kids start getting into the white schools.
FERD STOUTEN: In 5, 10 years, none of these white schools are white anymore and that's the natural process and I think that's the way it should be.
REPORTER: Do you think that by not having more black kids here, you might tend to be more racist in the future?
KIDS: No. That's not true.
REPORTER: Why?
KIDS: Because...I don't know. I don't think bad about black people or something.
The kids at the Montessori school, don't believe that their all-white environment makes them intolerant, but already the shift in public debate about multiculturalism has had its effect on attitudes towards migrants.
KIDS: It's getting really full in here, there's not that much space for housing and things like that, so they have to contribute to society and not be doing nothing, and nothing good to the Amsterdam or the country, yes. So they have to work hard to stay here.
With migrant children now dominating some schools, their parents are pushing for official recognition of their culture and language. Turkish migrants have tried to have Turkish letters officially adopted into the Dutch alphabet, as well as the compulsory teaching of Turkish as a second language in Dutch schools.
ERIC BALEMANS: And my first reaction was for me that's out of the question, absolutely out of the question. The Dutch are famous for their knowledge of languages, the English language is one of them, and then we have German and French as an obligational language as well. If you want to learn the Turkish language, you do that at your own place, and the government doesn't have to facilitate it, nor has to pay for it.
Activists like Zeki Arslan believe that de-facto segregation must be stopped and schools forced to adopt a more even racial mix of students.
ZEKI ARSLAN (Translation): Another way, and one which lately has become a point of discussion is to use a quota system. This means that white schools take responsibility for an intake of 30%-40% of migrant students. And black schools have the same percentage, namely 30%-40% of white students.
But the Dutch government is not interested in a quota system. In fact, there are no policies to end the segregation in Dutch schools. Instead, they've embarked on a tough, cruel-to-be-kind approach to migrants. In February, the government introduced a plan to force around 25,000 failed asylum seekers back to their own countries. And for those migrants already in Holland, the only way to preserve social cohesion, according to Balemans, is to force them to integrate into Dutch culture.
ERIC BALEMANS: The public agrees with me on the policy that we have to follow a tough line now. Tell the people what you think, give the arguments why you say it and then strive for solutions, because if you don't give solutions in the coming two, three years, whether it will be here in the Netherlands or in Australia, the problem will be 10 times as big in five years time.
Others say that getting tough on immigrants will be counter-productive.
RUUD KOEPENS: I think most immigrants want to integrate. They want to be active on the labour market. They want a good education for their children. So in that sense I think sort of choosing words like "being cruel" or "being tough" suggest the wrong thing because they suggest that integration policies should somehow force immigrants to do things they wouldn't want to do.
At the JP Coen School in Amsterdam, principal Jannie Tuin believes that greeting each child individually is the best start to the school day. To an overseas visitor there's something else unusual about this school. Although it's the local primary school, not one of the kids is ethnically Dutch.
JANNIE TUIN: In Holland, you call it a black school. We don't like the word so much but they call it a black school, only children from foreign countries. Ten years ago we had some Dutch children - a group of Dutch children in the school - and then they learned better Dutch and now it's a real problem that the school, there are only foreign children.
In a multicultural city like Amsterdam, it's not surprising to find schools with a high percentage of non-Dutch children. But what is unique is the almost complete segregation of the entire school system along racial lines. Just 15 minutes drive away, in the very centre of Amsterdam, in a well to do suburb, students rehearse in English as well as Dutch. Here, the Dutch clearly hold an ethnic majority. It's what they call around here, a white school.
RUUD KOEPENS, SOCIOLOGIST: Most of the schools in a city like Amsterdam tend to be either predominantly black or predominantly white, 'black' meaning in the Dutch context not necessarily skin colour but simply non-Dutch descent, so a Turk for instance is seen as black in that context although most are rather white skin colour like you and me.
Ruud Koepens is a sociologist whose views on Dutch multiculturalism have often got him into trouble. He accuses his countrymen of allowing an apartheid-style school system to emerge.
RUUD KOEPENS: If that is the actual practice in Dutch society, then it is very reminiscent of apartheid in a way. It's this whole system in the Netherlands, of stimulating segregated institutions if it is combined with social inequality, well then, to some extent, it becomes an apartheid system.
ZEKI ARSLAN, ACTIVIST (Translation): Apartheid here wasn't initiated by the government. I call it "Unintentional Apartheid".
Zeki Arslan is a Turkish-born education activist. He agrees that Holland is becoming increasingly divided along racial lines.
ZEKI ARSLAN, (Translation): I see it as a great problem for Dutch society in the next ten years. For Amsterdam and Rotterdam it's probably too late already.
An incredible influx of migrants over the last generation has skewed the population balance. Already, 50% of school-age kids in Amsterdam are from migrant backgrounds. The numbers have overwhelmed schools in poorer suburbs and the white parents have moved their kids to white schools. In Holland, they call it white flight.
ZEKI ARSLAN (Translation): So this high concentration has created new problems like the formation of black only or white only schools, a problem that no one knows how to solve at the moment.
Within five years, more than half the residents of Holland's four biggest cities will be of foreign origin. Muiderpoort is just a few minutes drive from Amsterdam's centre but here native Dutch people are few and far between. It's a melting pot of mainly Moroccan and Turkish immigrants who've formed an almost exclusively ethnic community. In other words, a non-white ghetto.
ZEKI ARSLAN (Translation): In a way it's nice to end up in an area like this, but at the same time it causes new problems, especially for young children who should be coming into contact with the Dutch language and going to school with Dutch-speaking children.
The sheer size of the migrant population has driven the segregation of the suburbs and the school system. The fear is that a divided society entrenches the disadvantage of migrants and fuels anger from native Dutch that their culture is being swamped. It has become the hot issue in Dutch politics.
ERIC BALEMANS, DUTCH LIBERAL PARTY: You can't talk through these issues. If you look at the birth rate in the Netherlands you see that people who are originally Dutch, have an average 1.3 children. The Muslim society in this country, has an average of 5, 6 children, which means that there will be a shift in society.
Eric Balemans is the education spokesman for the Dutch Liberal party part of the ruling coalition in the Netherlands. He says the shift in society is so profound that the previous policy of multiculturalism must be questioned.
ERIC BALEMANS: My predecessors had the idea that a multicultural society would be to the benefit of all, and what we now can conclude, it failed completely.
TEACHER (Translation): Roy, you've been sick for a long time so you've missed a few pages. You need to do pages 9 and 10 but not all the questions.
Despite adequate funding and all the facilities of the state system, children in black schools are slow to progress and many fail to achieve a satisfactory higher education. Dutch parents have moved their kids to white schools for their better academic results. But for those Dutch parents too poor to move, it's led to resentment about the impact of immigrants on the school environment.
DORIEN FLIERVOET, SINGLE MUM: It irritates me too when I go to this school when you have mothers who talk in their own language to each other. Actually it irritates me because I think it's a bit impolite also because I can't talk with them, I can't hear what they say and I would like that they tried, or even just talked Dutch.
Dorien Fliervoet is a single mother in an ethnic neighbourhood. She can't afford to pay for a private education so she's been forced to send her young daughter to the local, black school and she's worried about how this will affect her child's education.
DORIEN FLIERVOET: Sometimes they say about those people, the Moroccan families, that they leave their children out on the streets and they don't care and there's not much education around, they're educated by grandmother or grandfather, so that concerns me a bit then, yeah.
Even the teachers at black schools say the children's poor academic performance is related to foreigners' willingness to learn Dutch.
JANNIE TUIN: We've really gone out of our way here in Holland to accommodate the influx of foreigners into this country. We're now saying "You're living here, we expect you to make an effort to fit in." This includes learning the Dutch language. We can't have people living here for 30 years who don't speak Dutch.
In black schools, all the education - even the puppet shows - are in Dutch. In multicultural Holland, it's surprising in this show from Dutch folklore to find a character called Black Pete - said to be a Moorish slave helper to St Nicholas. But Holland is changing. The migrant influx and the segregated schools are driving a policy change from the current governing right-wing coalition.
ERIC BALEMANS: It started with the parents who came here who didn't want to accept the values of the Dutch society, and it continues when you send the second or third generation to school. If they don't want to accept our values and find a way in our society, then it is actually the origin of future problems.
AMAL FAKHOR (Translation): Holland is a nice country, but lately it hasn't been so good. There are different opinions about migrants. Some tend to be more tolerant than others.
Amal is a Moroccan immigrant with two children in a black school. She says the debate about integration and accepting Dutch culture should be a two-way street.
AMAL FAKHOR (Translation): We're told "Learn Dutch so you can understand us” we hear that all the time “ Learn Dutch really well, get to know our culture”, But they forget that they should understand our culture. We can’t live together if you don’t understand me. It’s not enough if I understand you but you don’t understand me. Multiculturalism means that you understand me, and I understand you.
But the pleas for understanding from migrants are not finding political support. Instead, the political rhetoric is hardening.
ERIC BALEMANS: If you look back in the last 20, 25 years, we've tried to cover up all the problems we had with immigrants, all the problems we had in the educational system with youngsters from another origin and that covering-up actually made the situation worse.
At the exclusive Montessori white high school in Amsterdam, students debate the finer points of Dutch literature.
BOY (Translation):"He can't know what the animals feel.
TEACHER (Translation): No, but we can try.
BOY (Translation): But mice are a low form of life, you couldn't tell. You can't say they're feeling this or that.
TEACHER (Translation): You don't know.
There's more than 1,000 children at this school but hardly any foreign-born teenagers. This is where privileged white parents send their kids. It's certainly a liberal environment. The students are even allowed to smoke in the playground. But with special entrance exams and high fees, migrant kids have been left out of the equation. But here, the traditional rhetoric of tolerance still prevails even if the practice argues otherwise.
REPORTER: Black and white schools - you don't like the term?
FERD STOUTEN, PRINCIPAL: No, absolutely not.
REPORTER: Why not?
FERD STOUTEN: Why not? Because nothing has to do with colour of skin or eyes or whatever, just - schools have to deal with education and they should make a good program for the children. Each of these small schools have there own room where they can study. And about 30%-40% of the time the children choose themselves for which subject they are going to work at.
Ferd Stouten makes no apologies about the fact that his school is almost exclusively white. He sees it as just a matter of time before migrant kids start getting into the white schools.
FERD STOUTEN: In 5, 10 years, none of these white schools are white anymore and that's the natural process and I think that's the way it should be.
REPORTER: Do you think that by not having more black kids here, you might tend to be more racist in the future?
KIDS: No. That's not true.
REPORTER: Why?
KIDS: Because...I don't know. I don't think bad about black people or something.
The kids at the Montessori school, don't believe that their all-white environment makes them intolerant, but already the shift in public debate about multiculturalism has had its effect on attitudes towards migrants.
KIDS: It's getting really full in here, there's not that much space for housing and things like that, so they have to contribute to society and not be doing nothing, and nothing good to the Amsterdam or the country, yes. So they have to work hard to stay here.
With migrant children now dominating some schools, their parents are pushing for official recognition of their culture and language. Turkish migrants have tried to have Turkish letters officially adopted into the Dutch alphabet, as well as the compulsory teaching of Turkish as a second language in Dutch schools.
ERIC BALEMANS: And my first reaction was for me that's out of the question, absolutely out of the question. The Dutch are famous for their knowledge of languages, the English language is one of them, and then we have German and French as an obligational language as well. If you want to learn the Turkish language, you do that at your own place, and the government doesn't have to facilitate it, nor has to pay for it.
Activists like Zeki Arslan believe that de-facto segregation must be stopped and schools forced to adopt a more even racial mix of students.
ZEKI ARSLAN (Translation): Another way, and one which lately has become a point of discussion is to use a quota system. This means that white schools take responsibility for an intake of 30%-40% of migrant students. And black schools have the same percentage, namely 30%-40% of white students.
But the Dutch government is not interested in a quota system. In fact, there are no policies to end the segregation in Dutch schools. Instead, they've embarked on a tough, cruel-to-be-kind approach to migrants. In February, the government introduced a plan to force around 25,000 failed asylum seekers back to their own countries. And for those migrants already in Holland, the only way to preserve social cohesion, according to Balemans, is to force them to integrate into Dutch culture.
ERIC BALEMANS: The public agrees with me on the policy that we have to follow a tough line now. Tell the people what you think, give the arguments why you say it and then strive for solutions, because if you don't give solutions in the coming two, three years, whether it will be here in the Netherlands or in Australia, the problem will be 10 times as big in five years time.
Others say that getting tough on immigrants will be counter-productive.
RUUD KOEPENS: I think most immigrants want to integrate. They want to be active on the labour market. They want a good education for their children. So in that sense I think sort of choosing words like "being cruel" or "being tough" suggest the wrong thing because they suggest that integration policies should somehow force immigrants to do things they wouldn't want to do.