This book describes and analyses the history of Dutch mathematics education from the point of view of the changing motivations behind the teaching of mathematics over a 200 year period. During the course of the 19th century, mathematics in the Netherlands developed from a topic for practitioners into a school topic that was taught to almost all pupils of secondary education.  As mathematics teaching gradually lost its practical orientation and became more and more motivated on the basis of its supposed formative value, the HBS (Hogere Burgerschool), the Dutch variant of the...