ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Dutch teacher-training institutes for primary education deal with multicultural education and on how they are implementing teaching programmes. Fase and van den Berg (1985) conducted one of the first research studies into multicultural education in Dutch primary education. The historical development of the Dutch educational system has resulted in a structural diversification of institutes for the training of teachers for distinctive educational levels. The training of primary-school teachers was directly connected with and practised by the headmaster of the school that they had attended as a pupil. In a number of regions teachers of primary schools have learned multicultural teaching the hard way, forced by practical circumstances in which they were confronted with a high percentage of pupils from ethnic-minority groups. It seems that the successfulness of multicultural changes in schools depends very much on the support of senior-staff management.
