Classroom preoccupations: the shadow of the past in Dutch vocational training

This paper outlines the relevance of history for the understanding of everyday life at a lower vocational training school (VMBO) in Amsterdam in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ideas, symbols and culture of the past remain alive as social memories, and they are employed and reconstructed by students and teachers alike. Echoes of the past loom large in the outsider position of these schools and their students, resonating in their classroom interactions, in their thinking, feeling and acting. By combining Norbert Elias' process sociology with Erving Goffman's symbolic interactionism, I aim to show that these two perspectives complement each other and require each other to fully understand everyday social practices.