ABSTRACT
As a general rule, Dutch children receive no teaching of literature until the fourth year of secondary school. The main emphasis on literature teaching comes in the fifth and sixth years, when the students are 16-18-years-old. Of course, there is a lot of reading of fiction and non-fiction in lower secondary education, but only in higher secondary education has the teaching of literature a formal status. Educational policy is changing now towards a more centralized curriculum, but in Dutch culture this kind of centralization is as nothing compared to the UK, for instance. Freedom and autonomy are features in the field of education that prevent the Dutch government from centralizing to the degree found in such countries as England and Greece. Although we have central exams for secondary education, teachers have a lot of freedom with regard to aims and methods of teaching, especially in the Mother tongue curriculum, which in the Netherlands includes Dutch language and literature. Even now, when a need is felt among teachers to formulate aims more centrally in order to avoid possible curricular chaos, centralization will not affect the 'standard' differences in teaching. In order to contextualize the procedures we will provide for the evaluation of the literature curriculum, we will first provide some information about the literature curriculum in the Netherlands. Although we have stressed the differences existing in aims and methods, we will now give some general facts, extracted from a national sUlVey we carried out (Janssen and Rijlaarsdam, 1992a; Janssen and Rijlaarsdam, 1995).
