The quote in the title is a completely vacuous statement. Of course we need to challenge each student. Nobody is denying that. The problem is that nobody feels challenged when the bar is set so high that they know they'll never achieve it. So we need individual goals for individual people. For some students, that means lowering the bar, for others, that means making it even higher.

The current system completely fails to do that. We set goals based on what subject pupils choose instead. So when the bar is too high for a pupil, the only alternative is choosing to study something completely different. Imagine universities worked that way. "Hmm, you seem to have failed your third year of geology, let's put you into a fourth-year Russian linguistics class next year." It's completely absurd, and it means only our subjects of mathematics, Greek, Latin and science in ASO get taught properly. All other subjects are filled with students that are both not interested in the subject, and have missed several years of experience. This leads to statistics where people's chances to pass when studying economy in university is somehow higher when they did not study economy in high school. And the same goes for engineering, linguistics, psychology, ...

What Bart De Wever of course means is that he believes that a Latin course should be reserved for smart people. But this is bullshit. We need a way for smart people to get a technical education where they are actually challenged, just like we need a way for less intelligent people to study some Latin if they're interested in it. That's not lowering the bar, that's treating pupils as individuals.