To what extent a school wall map should resemble reality has always been a point of discussion in the scholastic world. The personal beliefs and efforts of the map author, usually a school teacher, largely determined the fidelity and up-to-dateness of the school wall map. R. Schuiling, a teacher associated at a training-college, was known for his exhaustive geographic handbooks and textbooks. In agreement with this, his large-sized (5 m²) school wall map of the Dutch East Indies (‘Schoolkaart van Insulinde’, already mentioned above in the paragraph ‘Map content’) is a comprehensive, up-to-date and as accurate as possible summary of the 19th-century cartographic achievements in the Dutch East Indies (see Figure 7). For compiling this map Schuiling used as source material a large number of individual maps, maps in books and maps in several journals (especially ‘Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap’ and ‘Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen’) [2].
 



However, Schuiling’s map is not representative of other school wall maps. As the making of these maps was for most authors a secondary activity, the map fidelity and up-to-datenesss are often not optimal. Figure 8 gives an example. The four map extracts of the island Timor, taken from four school wall maps of the Dutch East Indies (period 1915 - 1933), differ significantly with regard to relief representation and the coast and boundary-lines. Furthermore, the in 1901 discovered phenomenon that the form of Timor is constricted in the middle part, is only correctly depicted on map extracts a and b. The authors of maps c and d might not have been well informed about the sudden ‘loss’ of land in Timor in 1901. It is also possible, however, they did not consider an adaptation in a new edition of the school wall map worth the costs.