Why Marianne Zwagerman needs to be put in the corner for a moment

And can also get out very quickly

And there was Marianne Zwagerman, who spoke at an experience about how we should stop calling people lower educated. I lingered on the video in my timeline, thought she had a point, because I always think it's good that every person has talent for something else and that Kees is a brilliant lawyer and that Jan-Pieter makes the most beautiful things with his hands. How awkward would it be if we could all mercilessly arrange flowers or if the world was filled with Karl Lagerfelds? That would be a mess, a fashionable and flowery mess, but a mess nonetheless. You are not lower educated, says Marianne, practically educated is how we should call it from now on. 1-0 for Marianne, I actually thought. Until she started talking about the study of Leisure Management at 1 minute and 43 seconds, with a rather cynical tone, which actually says: hey you there with your study, you could just as well have skipped it, because it makes absolutely no sense.

I called Reuben Wijnberg, team leader of the Leisure & Events Management program in Amsterdam, to see what they themselves thought of Marianne's account. “I thought the discussion between high and low educated was good, only it's a shame that she belittles a study she apparently knows so little about to make a point. She doesn't even know half of how the study is structured,” says Reuben. “We spend together 50 to 75 billion a year on leisure, and that's not even counting tourism. Our study, I can say is tough, is accredited every six years, we focus on Urban Leisure because we are in Amsterdam. That city competes with cities like Berlin, Copenhagen, and Barcelona for the best leisure quality in the world. Amsterdam is doing so well that it is even becoming too crowded.”

The student learns everything about concept development, marketing, production, and management in four years. Sounds like quite a hefty program, I think. Reuben: “Our students are producers at the Loveland festival, do sales for the Eye film museum, coordinate the events of Artis, and start a catering business that is thriving. The successful entrepreneur Anna-Maria Giannattasio is the founder and creative director of Puur Events and studied Leisure & Events.” I googled her and saw that she counts Heineken, Coca Cola, Rabo, and KLM among her clients. But that's not worth a study, says Marianne, because what on earth do you learn there? Notably, zero percent of the alumni who graduated 1.5 years or longer ago are unemployed.

Marianne, I think that the room of the seminar you are speaking at is filled with thanks to students of Leisure Management. In your dressing room, sparkling water and a green salad are ready because the organizer (who sat in the lecture hall for that study) ensures that this is taken care of. The marketing trick to fill the room of the Leadership Experience could very well come from this type of thinking. Leisure is an industry where you can have twenty staff and turn over a million (this is the quota for success in a business, preaches Marianne in her books), just like automotive technology or law. We want to dance until midnight at festivals, eat from cardboard boxes at a food truck, have fun in front of the holiday home, ride a Solex because we never did that, and park your boat in a brand new marina. Big bucks, that's leisure, economy. Entrepreneurs, who might be sitting in your audience, earn from this. And why should a leisure manager be any less than a car mechanic?

I thought your plea for the practically educated person was good, until you insulted another. By the way, on a media level, it was almost genius, because everyone is talking about it. Me too, yes. For the record.