Lampas - Volume 57, Issue 4, 2024

This article takes the recent national canon debates in the Low Countries as a starting point to explore contemporary views on canons and canonicity, and their implications for the so-called classical school canon. In 2005, the Dutch Education Council recommended that history education should pay due attention to its socialization task: to provide a common, national historical frame of reference for all people living in the Netherlands in order to counteract social disintegration caused by increasing individualism and migration. This new initiative was anchored successfully in the familiar cultural concept of ‘the canon’. It led to a veritable boom of canons in the Low Countries but also to sharp criticism, especially from academic specialists. What lessons can classicists draw from the controversies over the national canon? This article explores the history of the canon concept, reconstructs the national canon debate and compares the national canon with the classical canon. It reflects on and brings in concepts and tools, primarily from the adjacent field of heritage studies, for the ongoing conversation about the classical school canon.

This article discusses reforms in the Dutch Latin schools in the first part of the 17^th century, and the role played by the canonization of disciplines in this period. The underlying reasons and historical and political contexts in which the reforms took place, and which appear to have lasting impact to the present day, are also disussed. It will be shown how the need for standardization of the very different local practices, in order to achieve a higher level of learning, led to a prescribed set of authors and disciplines for local use in grammar schools. The ultimate goal of the reforms was the education of protestant pastors, who, in competition with jesuit catholic education, were trained in classical and biblical learning. The so-called Schoolordre of 1625, issued by the province of Holland, was the document written in order to raise pre-academic education to a higher level.

This contribution studies the Loeb Classical Library (LCL) collection, and delves into the dynamics which underlie the processes of inclusion and exclusion in the first twenty years of the book series’ existence through the study of archival source material. After introducing the subject, the article provides a concise overview of the books that were published in the series between 1912 and 1933. Then, the process of canon formation is analysed. The contribution highlights five factors which influenced the series’ development, and specifically illustrates how the inclusion of three potential LCL titles depended on them. This case study hopes to demonstrate that the notion of the ‘classical’ is continuously reshaped and amended, both deliberately and involuntarily.

This paper explores the opportunities for opening up the canon of Latin texts being read at Flemish secondary schools that lie in the new set of learning objectives for classical languages formulated by the Flemish government and in force since September 2023. These no longer restrict the teaching of the classical languages to texts from the Classical period. This decision addresses the ideological foundations of the teaching of Latin. At the same time, it opens up new horizons. One is to approach Latin as the language of a diverse and ever-changing Europe. Abandoning the traditional school canon is an important first step. This can be complemented by pursuing a set of key competences in line with the EU’s pedagogical project to shape European citizenship. The long and varied Latin tradition within Europe allows us to explore the tension between polycentric regionalism and the dream of universality. Reading texts from later periods also creates opportunities for an emancipating dynamic, for differentiation and openness, of which we can make excellent use within a modern and diverse school context. Latin can then be defined as the language in between: between local and universal, between past and present, between Europe and world, the language of transfer, encounter and conflict.

Classical language teachers in Dutch secondary schools are free to choose the texts they read with their students, with the exception of (part of) the final year for which a national committee sets an annually changing text corpus of prose or poetry on which the national final examination is based. So far, there is no record of the actual selection of texts that teachers choose to read with their students, and we know even less about the selection process. However, there is discussion among teachers about whether canonical or non-canonical texts are best suited for secondary education. Moreover, we have recently witnessed processes of (re)canonisation in other school subjects in the field of humanities. This article explores current debates around the choices of canonical or non-canonical texts in secondary classical education using two panel discussions and a questionnaire as sources. Second, we contextualize these debates by describing recent developments in the teaching of history and Dutch literature in secondary education. Finally, we introduce a recently started PhD project whose questions are the prelude to further research on this topic.