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Empire and ethnocentric education
What is Empire but the predominance of Race … do we not hail in this, less than the energy and fortune of a race, than in the supreme direction of the Almighty? (Lord Rosebery, 1900)
The unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years or more is a phenomenon unique in history … from this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring … all that is peculiar to the gifts and the achievements of the British nation. (Enoch Powell, quoted in Lord Howard of Rising, 2014: 146)
Trying to explain the British Empire to most young people, unless they have specifically ‘done a module’ on some aspect, is to invite incomprehension. Even older people, schooled during decolonisation, have little knowledge about it, the Commonwealth or recent global migrations, although regrets for a lost empire still linger. But explaining the 2016 Brexit vote, trade wars and race and migrant antagonisms must start with the British Empire, specifically in the later 19th century, when power, wealth and trade dominance were concentrated in a predominantly white world. Any early 19th-century humanitarian notions, which had influenced legislation ending slavery, gave way, as more countries were added to the Empire, to beliefs that ‘black and brown subjects were natural inferiors’ (Lloyd, 1984: 180). Beliefs that God was in favour of white supremacy and imperial expansion were widely embraced, as Lord Rosebery, in his inaugural address as Rector of the University of Glasgow in 1900, indicated. Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, and there was a ‘scramble’ for imperial control of African countries by major European powers in 1884. American historian David Goldberg wrote that by the late 19th century, race ‘had assumed throughout the European orbit a sense of naturalness … a more or less taken for granted marking of social arrangements … an assumed givenness and inevitability in the ascription of superiority and inferiority’ (Goldberg, 2009: 3). But he also noted that it took hard work to reproduce social and racial arrangements. Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric were co-opted to establish assumptions of white superiority.
Although in 1805 Prime Minister William Pitt and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte were famously lampooned via a cartoon of a plum pudding representing the globe for dividing the world up between them, the 1880s to the 1930s was the high point of imperial conquests and trade that benefited Britain. Imperial expansion by this time was dedicated to capturing markets and claiming natural resources in colonised countries for exploitation. An ignorance of the actual territories comprising the British Empire continued into the 20th century, some people being confused in 1982 when the Argentineans invaded the Falkland Islands, which many thought were Scottish islands. Imperial arrogance was evident during this war, with naval officer David Tinker writing that, ‘The navy felt that we were British and they (the Argentineans) were wogs, and that made all the difference’ (Tinker, 1982: 178). David was killed aged 26, in the war.
Although she never visited, Victoria was interested in India, and in 1895 she formed a friendship with her Indian servant Abdul Karim (‘the Munshi’) which shocked her courtiers, a film of this being released in 2017.1 But it was Victorian beliefs in racial superiority, underpinned by pseudo-scientific rationalisations for political and economic takeovers and exploitation of other countries, plus renewed militarism and notions of patriotism, that created the English assumptions of nationalistic superiority that survives to the present day. Enoch Powell (of whom more in later chapters) could, in a speech in 1961, refer to distant continents and strange races even while colonies in those continents were fighting for independence and Britain was becoming more multiracial, multicultural and multireligious. His appeal was as a major advocate of an imperialist ideology and a popularist nationalism that, in the 21st century, has found expression in right-wing politics in and out of parliaments, and in a resurgence of white supremacist activities in Europe and the USA.
The aim of this chapter is to link some significant events in the development of education in England in the 19th and 20th centuries with imperial events and ideologies. This was a period when, as Aminul Hoque noted, a rhetoric of coloniser versus the colonised, powerful versus powerless, civilised versus uncivilised, modern versus backward, educated versus uneducated, helped shape and institutionalise race, class and gender relations between white people and those from the ‘dark continents’ of Africa and Asia (Hoque, 2015). The chapter indicates the way in which ‘British values’, imbued with nationalism, militarism and racial arrogance, were filtered down from public schools to secondary and elementary schools through an imperially oriented curriculum, textbooks and juvenile literature that reflected and entrenched beliefs in the superiority of white people and a distrust of foreigners.
Education and empire
In Andrea’s Levy’s novel Small island, the child Queenie is taken by her father to the Empire Exhibition in 1924. Watching a black woman skilfully weaving cloth, she was told that ‘We’ve got machines to do that’ and ‘They’re not civilised, they only understand drums’ (Levy, 2004: 5). In the real world at this time, an African-American classical pianist Florence Price was composing her Symphony No 1 in E minor, in which she incorporated some drumming, drums being forbidden under slave regimes in case secret messages were transmitted. Price’s symphony was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1932, and in 2018 featured in a concert by the Cheltenham Philharmonic Orchestra in England. There has always been more interest in how the British Empire influenced education in colonised countries than in how schools taught about empire to the children of the imperialists in Britain (McCulloch, 2009). Lord Macaulay did his best by asserting that he had not found one Orientalist ‘who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia’ (quoted in Moorhouse, 1984: 77). Connecting imperial events and education developments, and the ideologies and beliefs that imbued imperialists and educators in Britain from the high point of empire to eventual decline, is important, as whatever the outcome of the vote to leave the EU, what was a United Kingdom will be a much diminished and disunited country. The point to be made, sustained in future chapters, is that education at all levels has never come to terms with the imperial xenophobia, arrogance and ignorance that continues to be demonstrated before and after the Brexit vote and subsequent negotiations to leave the EU.
The 1880s through to the 1930s was a time when, after vast areas of Africa and Asia were taken over, the empire was at its height, and a range of invented imperial traditions were developing. The period coincided with a social class-based expansion of mass education in England. Historians of education agreed that the struggle to deliver education to the working classes over the 19th century mirrored a hierarchical social structure that placed their schooling firmly within the lower layers of the social class pyramid. Brian Simon, in his studies of education from the 18th to the 20th centuries, noted that after universal secondary education developed, class and interest group conflicts persisted, but what was actually taught in schools was always influenced by the public (non-state private) schools attended by the upper-class young. The values underpinning schooling filtered down from public to grammar to elementary schooling (Simon, 1960, 1990). With some prescience, he noted that from the later 19th century the role of examinations became more important, especially in these public schools. As one maths textbook of 1892 pointed out, ‘many persons who are supposed to have received the best education the country affords, are in matters of numerical information ignorant and helpless, in a manner which places them far below members of the middle classes’ (Colenso, 1892: introduction). Future engineers and merchants of the British Empire needed to be able to work out the gross annual receipts and dividends to British shareholders who invested in railways, especially in India, where money needed to be converted to and from rupees, and they needed to be examined on their knowledge.2 While upper-class boys were being trained to run the empire, the imperial subjects were not so lucky. Some elite schools in colonial countries, set up along the lines of English public schools, were educating colonial elites, but the masses had little or no schooling. When the British finally did leave India, the illiteracy rate was 80-85% across the country.
Significant events |
| 1864 | Report of the Clarendon Commission on English public schools |
| 1868 | Schools Inquiry Commission |
| 1869 | Francis Galton (Hereditary genius) and the rise of Social Darwinism |
| 1870 | Education (Elementary) Act |
| 1885/89 | Egerton report on defective children |
| 1899-1902 | Boer War and concern over (white) racial deterioration |
| 1902 | Education Act |
| 1905 | Aliens Act |
| 1906 | Labour Party formed |
| 1914-1918 | First World War |
| 1916 | Sykes–Picot Agreement |
| 1917 | Balfour Declaration |
| 1919 | Scheme to distribute land in Kenya to white European officers |
| 1919 | Jallianwalla Bagh massacre; Indian Independence movement |
| 1922 | Labour Party manifesto, Education for all (school leaving age raised to 14) |
| 1924 | Empire Exhibition at Wembley |
| 1926 | Empire Marketing Board set up |
| 1931 | Mahatma Gandhi visits Lancashire |
| 1930s | 42 million British subjects, 500 million imperial subjects |
| 1939-1945 | Second World War |
In 1864 the Clarendon Commission reported on the top nine public schools. It was chaired by the Earl of Clarendon, whose family owned land in Jamaica and who had been connected to slavery and the sugar trade. Recommendations were made to improve the organisation and curriculum of the schools, a culture of athleticism was encouraged, and the schools encouraged belief in the superior moral virtue of the upper-class boys they were educating. Cheltenham College claimed it was a training place for defenders of the empire; Haileybury and Marlborough schools were praised as places where those going out to rule the Empire ‘lived and died as officers and gentlemen’ (Simon, 1960: 328). Commissions and reports on the then existing grammar schools for the middle classes and on elementary education led to the conclusion that ‘the different classes of society … require different teaching’ (Schools Inquiry Commission, 1868). Although public schools retained their emphasis on the classics, their schools and those for the middle classes were to have a grounding in maths, science, English, history and geography.
An 1870 Education Act created mass elementary education for the working classes, concentrating on literacy, numeracy, moral and manual training, although it was not until 1876 that schooling to age 12 was made compulsory. A Moral Instruction League was influential enough for a syllabus for moral teaching to be placed into the 1906 Code of Regulations for elementary schools. There were similar intentions behind sending missionaries out to moralise to the colonised and teaching the working class to be well behaved and moral. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, through his writings on Hereditary genius (1869), helped to popularise Social Darwinism and eugenic theories, through which it was eventually suggested that low ability, mental defect, delinquency, crime, prostitution, illegitimacy and even unemployment were inherited tendencies in the lower social classes (RCCCFM, 1908). A Royal Commission was set up in 1885 to report on the education of those considered physically and mentally defective, chaired by Lord Egerton, whose family had also become wealthy by interests in the West Indian sugar trade (Egerton Commission, 1889). Eugenic theories underpinned beliefs in the inferior intellect of the lower classes and of the colonised.
Passion for the classification of supposed races along biological lines developed around the same time as eugenic theories were spreading. A white Caucasoid ‘race’ was supposedly superior to Mongoloid and Negroid ‘races’. In 1866 John Langton Down explained Mongolism (later Down’s syndrome) as having an appearance similar to what was described as a Mongoloid race (Tomlinson, 2017: 33). The stereotypes of the defective, ignorant and idle lower working classes in England were similar to the stereotypes of lazy and stupid ‘natives’ overseas. Assumptions of biological and cultural deficiencies in the lower classes and in other supposed races persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1899 the British government became concerned about a ‘degenerate’ working class while recruiting for the Boer War against Dutch settlers in South Africa. Army recruits were discovered to be weak and malnourished, and in the final wars of imperial expansion, demonstrated to an Edwardian elite a deterioration of what was termed the (white) ‘British race’. Efforts were made to improve the health of school children – a schools medical service was set up in 1907. Baden Powell created his Boy Scout movement in 1908 with the intention of transforming ‘pale narrow-chested miserable specimens who smoked, loafed and practised self-abuse’ into a healthy race (quoted in Brendon, 2007: 226), although recruits to the 1914 First World War infantry were deemed not as healthy as some of the soldiers who had arrived from the Empire to help fight a European war.
Despite the war being won with the help of recruits from the Empire, especially from India and African countries, and with labourers from China, in 1918 the government set up a scheme to distribute some of the best land in Kenya to white Europeans who had fought for ‘King and Country’ (Best, 1979). In 2018 the artist William Kentridge set up a project in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London, to illustrate that the spread of the First Word War cost millions of African lives, as many people were conscripted by force to join, and the British were eager to take over the German colonies in East Africa. Ironically, some Africans joined in the war thinking that if they took part alongside white soldiers, they would be regarded as equals and given rights afterwards (Kentridge, quoted in Aspden, 2018). Meanwhile, in 1916 the Sykes–Picot Agreement, named after the British and French diplomats who signed it, carved up the Middle East territories between these countries, setting the stage for a perpetuation of conflicts into the 21st century. The 1917 Balfour Declaration concerning Palestine and a Jewish Homeland similarly set up future conflicts over land. Hostility to immigrants and a closing of free movement from Europe was evident via the Aliens Act 1905. This gave the Home Office responsibility for immigration, and was introduced to control the numbers of Jewish settlers arriving from Eastern Europe and Russia, who settled in the poor areas in London’s East End. This Act was partly in response to claims that 7 million immigrants would swamp British shores (although in the previous two decades 2 million Britons had emigrated). In 1900 a British Brotherhood League collected 45,000 signatures on a petition against immigration and to ‘stop Britain being a dumping ground for the scum of Europe’ (Benewick, 1969: introduction). This League was subsequently overtaken by an Immigrant Reform Association and Oswald Mosley’s National Union of Fascists.
Labour and education, 1900-39
By the early 1900s there were signs that Western European imperialism might be faltering. Denis Lawton, in his study of the Labour Party and education from 1900, wrote that the Boer War indicated to Gandhi that the British were not invincible and could be opposed in India (Lawton, 2005: 18). The Russian Revolution, First World War and the ending of the Hapsburg Empire suggested that empires and their colonies could not last for ever. But English education, dominated by a public school-educated aristocracy and civil service, persisted in its role of propping up the social structure and imperial overtones. In the 1890s, only around 2.5% of young people, largely upper and middle class, received a secondary education. Some elementary schools had developed a higher elementary education for working-class children with grants from local school boards. A legal judgment put a stop to this in 1900, and local school boards were abolished in 1902. The Duke of Devonshire, one of the country’s richest landowners, had, along with other aristocrats, worried that local school boards and trade unions were demanding a secondary education for all children rather than a narrow selection of ‘scholarship’ children. Another rich Irish landowner, the Marquis of Londonderry, appointed as President of the National Board of Education in August 1902, oversaw the (Balfour) Education Act 1902. This was largely the work of civil servant Robert Morant, whose views on education were essentially based on upper-class assumptions of social stability (Lawton, 2005: 12). The Act ensured that only those working-class children, with what was considered to be of exceptional ability, could join children whose parents could pay secondary school fees.
The Labour Party, formed in 1906, led the movement for secondary education for all, with the school-leaving age raised to 14 in 1922, although some in the Party still argued for selective schooling. Another Lord to chair the Board of Education, Lord Eustace Percy from the Duke of Northumberland’s wealthy family, also suggested that secondary education ought to remain exclusive. The Hadow Consultative Committee reported on The education of the adolescent in 1926, and recommended selection by ‘differentiation’ – a secondary modern school would have a four-year course ‘with a realistic and practical trend’ (Board of Education, 1927: 95), while grammar schools would pursue a literary and scientific curriculum. Technical and trade schools should develop to cater for the needs of local industry. Any possibility of comprehensive schooling disappeared for some years, and by 1939 and the start of the Second World War, 88% of young people had left school by the age of 14. The governments formed after 1931 were more interested in the ...
