Petrarca, Proba of toch Plinius? Wat lezen we met onze leerlingen en waarom?

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.