Lily Tekseng (University of Cambridge

Curriculum and colonialism

Content warning – racist language from historical primary sources.

One means through which students in public schools were transformed into students of empire was through the curriculum, in both overt and covert ways. There has been significant research into how the education of Classics in public schools was used to inculcate imperial ideas among the elites. But the dissemination of a sense of ownership of the empire and ideological justifications for colonisation also happened in much more obvious ways.

Here are some examples of examination papers from the Rugby School archive, dated 1889.

Implicit in this Geography paper is a strong sense of ownership of the world, and it gives us a hint of the violent, irreparable ways in which the world was remade since the beginning of European colonization.

Question no. 4 is interesting: “Write down the names of the chief families of the human race, and state to which we belong [bold emphasis added]”.

We are aware that the production of the category of the “human”, difference and racial hierarchies were integral parts of the ideology of rule under colonialism, but it is still interesting to see how deeply and inescapably these ideas were instilled at a very formative stage in different British lives.

Question 6 on this paper asks the students to [Slide 8]: “Say what you know about the history and abolition of slavery in America. If a white married a negro, what would his children be called, and their children if they married white people?”

In this seasonal Christmas exam paper, question 5 goes: “Briefly set forth—(1) The meaning of the word ‘India’, (2) Who won India, and how it was won. (3) Why England must keep India.”

The paper is likely set on the historian Robert Seeley’s hugely popular book The Expansion of England (1883), which advocated for the British empire.