We Live in Prussia — Statecraft

§ 01 · The occasion

In a regional press interview in May 2026 a teacher of Dutch argued for the abolition of the central school-leaving examination. He called it a ritual dance, compared the Education Inspectorate to the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, and proposed leaving the school diploma to the institution that has known the pupil for years.¹ The piece drew the usual reactions. Supporters recognised the fatigue of the exam season, opponents pointed to the importance of external calibration; both camps stayed within the form of the question.

What is rarely made explicit in that debate is the architecture to which the exam belongs. The school-leaving exam is not a stand-alone instrument. It is part of an education system designed around 1810, in Prussia, for a society that bears no demographic, economic or cultural resemblance to that of the Netherlands of 2026. The same observation applies to the social insurance system, designed around 1885, in Prussia, for an industrial class now reduced to a handful of per cent of the working population. Two architects, two architectures, one society that long ago outgrew them. And still we live in their building.

§ 02 · The two architects

Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Prussian statesman and philologist. During his brief tenure as head of the Section for Religion and Education at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, from 1809 to 1810, he designed the structural building blocks of the continental-European education system. Compulsory schooling, age cohorts, standardised curriculum, state examination, state-trained teachers, the division between Gymnasium for the elite and Volksschule for the masses, and the founding of the modern research university. The Bildung ideal he attached to it was no programme of liberation. It was a formative idealism in the service of a desired type of citizen: culturally cultivated, self-disciplined, loyal to the state as bearer of culture.²

The Netherlands did not take this design over directly, but through its own route. The School Act of 1806 under Louis Bonaparte enshrined the principle of state care for education. The Secondary Education Act of Thorbecke of 1863 introduced the Hogere Burgerschool (HBS), the Dutch translation of the continental two-track model. The Mammoth Act (Mammoetwet) of 1968 consolidated the division between HAVO and VWO, the two pre-university secondary tracks, as parallel preparations for higher education, with the central exam as external benchmark and the Education Inspectorate as quality guardian. They are steps, all Dutch in implementation, but their shared logic is Humboldtian.

Otto von Bismarck was Prussian Minister-President and then Reich Chancellor. In the 1880s, under pressure from the growth of social democracy and his own social-conservative conviction that the state must possess the loyalty of the working class, he designed the first compulsory social insurance system in the world. The Sickness Insurance Law of 1883, the Accident Insurance Law of 1884 and the Old Age and Disability Insurance Law of 1889 together form the foundation of the continental social insurance model. Its premise was the stabilised life-course of the male breadwinner in steady industrial employment, with at his side an unpaid caring spouse and a brood of children to support.³

The Netherlands took over this architecture too along its own route. The Accident Act of 1901, the Sickness Benefits Act of 1929, the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1949, the state pension AOW of 1956, the disability act WAO of 1967, the whole cassette of social insurance on which the Dutch poldermodel rests is in line with Bismarckian logic. Including the sector-based financing, the insurance principle above the care principle, and the central role of the employer-employee relationship as anchor point for access to the system.

§ 03 · The vacant programme

Both architectures presupposed a specific society. The Humboldtian school presupposed a homogeneous compulsory cohort trained for an industrial-bureaucratic labour market with a stable division between managerial and executive functions. The Bismarckian insurance presupposed a lifelong worker in steady industrial employment with a single wage earner per household.

Neither assumption stands. The learning cohort is more heterogeneous than the continental design ever foresaw; the labour market is fragmented into permanent jobs, flex, self-employment, platform work and hybrids between them; the lifelong employee is a statistical exception; the male sole earner is a marginal figure; and the industrial class that originally carried the insurance system has shrunk to about one-tenth of the working population. What has come in place of that society has not been met with a new architecture. It has been met with adjustments within the old one.

With that, the signature of the pattern described in the earlier Statecraft series as dissociation appears.⁴ The form still turns. The Education Inspectorate inspects, the exam is administered, UWV — the Dutch employee-insurance executive — pays out, the funds are filled, the premiums are collected. But the connection between the form and the society to which it was once an answer has largely fallen away. The system works. It is only no longer clear for what. The programme that filled the form is vacant.

That vacuum is no oversight. It is structurally protected by the transaction costs of real revision. Anyone tinkering with the logic of testing touches inspection, funding, teacher training, school boards, university admissions and parental expectations at once. Anyone tinkering with the social insurance system touches sector funds, social partners, the insurance principle, the fiscal logic of employer charges and the whole apparatus of the poldermodel at once. Every screw you loosen meets five other systems that turn on it. That is why the standard response is adjustment rather than redesign, and the standard debate abolition rather than the question-of-purpose. The abolition question leaves the architecture intact. The purpose question threatens it.

§ 04 · Conclusion

What the debate over the school bell, the central exam, the Wet DBA — the Deregulation of Assessment of Labour Relations Act, the law governing self-employment status — the pension transition and the WIA — the Work and Income (Capacity for Work) Act — have in common is that they are symptom debates that never reach the constitutive question beneath. For what kind of society does Dutch education still train. Against what kind of life-course does the Dutch system still insure. As long as those questions remain unanswered, the architecture stands and the reforms within the architecture remain cosmetic.

That is no exhortation to tear down the Prussian buildings. It is a finding that we live in them without knowing it, and that whoever denies the inhabitation can no longer design what should come in their place. A state that does not recognise its nineteenth-century architecture cannot address its twenty-first-century tasks. We live in Prussia; only Prussia itself no longer knows. And what Prussia no longer knows, the Netherlands can no longer transcend.

Colofon

“We Live in Prussia” is a Statecraft essay tracing the continental-European institutional architecture in which the Netherlands still lives back to Humboldt (education, 1810) and Bismarck (social insurance, 1880s), and applying it to the pattern of form-without-substance described in Series III as dissociation.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Footnotes

¹ The occasion for this piece was an interview in the regional press in May 2026 in which a teacher of Dutch argued for the abolition of the central school-leaving examination on the basis of his book on secondary education. The substantive argumentation of the teacher is not addressed further here; this piece uses the debate as an opening for a structural reading.

² For the Humboldtian philosophy of education see W. von Humboldt, Über die innere und äussere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin, 1810. For the critical reading of Bildung as a disciplinary formative mould see T. W. Adorno, Theorie der Halbbildung, first published in 1959, and M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Gallimard, 1975.

³ For the Bismarckian social architecture see G. A. Ritter, Der Sozialstaat. Entstehung und Entwicklung im internationalen Vergleich, Oldenbourg, third edition 2010. For the Dutch adaptation see K. P. Companje (ed.), Tussen volksverzekering en vrije markt. Verzekering van zorg op het snijvlak van sociale verzekering en gezondheidszorg 1880–2006, Aksant, 2008.

⁴ For the concept of dissociated organisation see J. Huibers, Dissociated Organisations (Series I), Statecraft, April–May 2026. For the broader elaboration of form-without-substance as institutional pattern see Reverberation (Series II), Statecraft, 2026, in particular symptom papers No. 02 The Silent Expropriation and No. 08 The Frozen Zeitgeist.