Cultural education and the canon

Content analysis of the papers showed that Germany, France, and England give the most attention to their own culture, to the culture of the past, and to high culture. Germany and France do this to a greater extent than England. The Netherlands deviates in all three respects. Unlike large countries with a strong cultural past and a dominant position in transnational cultural relations, a small country is inclined to watch and to follow the cultural centers in the world, and to emphasize and to join what is new instead of nourishing its own cultural past. National cultural values and repertoires, the cultural canon included, may be fruitfully understood as demonstrations of a core-periphery structure governing the transnational cultural exchange.