Educating empire: exploring exams and their colonial links
Olivia Hersey (University of Oxford)
By the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, imperialism had become a core part of national identity in Britain. It was embedded in all aspects of culture, including the academic world. While public schools such as Rugby educated boys to be highly intellectual, they also trained them to enter the world of the British Empire. The focus on the colonies in exam papers spanning various subjects from Rugby School in the 1890s is immense. The core curriculum was Greek, Latin, and Empire. It is almost inescapable, and that is because the British Empire was constantly grappling with the arrival of a modern age, trying to keep hold of resource-rich nations that were increasingly aware of the path to freedom. This blog post illuminates and contextualises specific moments from the rich examination resources available at the Rugby School archives. In so doing so, it highlights the expectations that the schoolboys faced: to become the next leaders of the British Empire’s future, or, at the very least, to enter society knowing what was at stake in the colonies. With the year 1900 looming, the future of the British Empire was at the crux of public school consciousness.
From entrance exams to geography prizes, the examination papers produced by Rugby School in the 1890s display the need to understand the British Empire’s economic mechanisms. Students current and prospective were asked across the board to name the countries that produced goods such as asphalt, opium, and other natural minerals. The schoolboy conception and perception of the wider world, as taught through geography at Rugby, was apparently largely material, and based on potential for wealth. The countries that students would write as answers were almost all those under British colonial rule. For example, the 1898 geography prize that asks for the country that the British get their asphalt from was set to students just a decade after the nation in question, Trinidad, was subsumed into the British Empire. Rugby School was acquainting its boys with the profitable aspects of the Empire to which they were to be successors. Such knowledge infiltrated their entire curriculum and shows how English public schools were preparing their students for a long future as imperialists.
Composition essays were set with the chief intention that students would demonstrate their aptitude in the act of writing. As such, set topics were typically of universal interest, and universal knowledge. For public schools like Rugby, one such subject was, of course, the empire in which almost everybody in the ruling classes had a stake. In July 1893, one Composition question set for the lower middle school was to ‘Write an Essay on The sinking of the Victoria, or, The Adventures of a Tin Kettle’. Here, there is a clear assumption that the student will have a knowledge of imperial proceedings. The latter option requires a knowledge of a changing industry, that of tin mining. While Cornwall was at the heart of the British Empire’s tin industry, it is important to note the decline of the Cornish mines in favour of tin-mining opportunities in British colonies: Chhattisgarh, Australia, and South Africa. This transition occurred across the second half of the nineteenth century and would have been topical to a Rugby boy. The future of the empire’s trade and the problems that might arise from reliance on turbulent states were essential knowledge for those wishing to pursue a career in the British Empire. The wording of the ‘adventures of a tin kettle’ prompt makes it highly possible that this question would have fuelled creative responses in the form of travel writing. This adds a palatability to the topic that cannot quite be brought to a tragedy such as HMS Victoria. ‘The Sinking of the Victoria’ adds to a continuous trend of quizzing the boys on their awareness of current events. The sinking of HMS Victoria was a great tragedy: lives were lost from this incident involving a collision between two Royal Navy ships. The incident led to much criticism of the Royal Navy’s competency and the initiatives put in place, particularly of Victoria’s admiral. A student’s account of the event through this question provided a space for political commentary and furthers the suggestion that Rugby School’s well-rounded boy was one who could advance the interests of Empire.
The sinking of the Victoria. Image credit: WikiMedia.
The 1897 Verse Equivalent exam for Sixth form and the Twenty consists of a list of questions about the state and democracy. Following this comes a question inciting an opinion piece on the relevance and necessity of slavery in the modern day. This progression suggests a desire for the student to be aware of what made past democracies successful (like Greece), and how Britain as a democracy and empire could boost its superiority in the timeline of great states. The anticipated answer would be one of anti-slavery sentiment, for the 1899 Geography prize paper poses the question: ‘What is the actual state and condition of the Slave Trade? How must it finally be suppressed?’. This question appears especially reflective when one considers the scramble for Africa that had occurred across the decade prior to the exam. As Britain colonised more and more African states there arose a desire to justify having a British influence in the nations that they had once enslaved. The British began in this period to see the importance of a certain level of independence, to preserve the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples. Britain’s attempt to control its African colonies from afar was doomed to undermine the liberal attitudes suggested in this composition paper. The rulers of the Empire viewed its colonies as a material resource and a source of plunder. A large gulf was maintained between Britain and the people of its Empire, as is perpetuated in a composition exam that asked for an essay on ‘The virtues and vices of savages’. Pejorative and damaging language like this emphasizes the general sentiment of white superiority. It shows that respect of native cultures and existing institutions did not run as deep as the centuries-spanning refusal to humanize the people of the world beyond the west. There is indeed a strong suggestion that the curriculum of public schools contained strong emancipatory feelings regarding the enslavement of people of colour. The previously discussed Geography Prize asks the Sixth which indigenous peoples of Africa have ‘shewn themselves to be most open to civilizing influences’. Public schools of this time thus perpetuated the idea that the only route to freedom was a submission to Western values that disregarded indigenous traditions.
An interesting trend in the translation exams set across 1892-9 is the use of intensely imperial passages of English prose. The constant focus on colonialism is a product of the public school curriculum’s cyclical nature. In expanding one’s literary horizon, one was preparing for the society that would surround them when administering the British Empire. The Sixth’s Christmas Greek translation task for the year 1893 is one such example. It contains an interesting sentence half-way through: ‘but let it be once understood that your government may be one thing, and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and everything hastens to decay and dissolution’. A rather intense passage for translation, this warns of the possibility that the people under British rule may one day seek emancipation. This passage argues against emancipation in favour of a sort of government-enforced liberty. Translating pro-Empire sentiments would have been an efficient means for public schools to set out a particular agenda for future leaders. The passage shows how liberal attitudes towards slavery and foreign cultures did not run as deeply as a superiority complex amongst the upper classes that appears both outwardly, in the use of words like ‘savage’, and inwardly, in the incorporation of imperial support through examinations.
The Rugby School archives hold examination paper records going into the twentieth century, and are a valuable resource for researching how prestigious institutions not only viewed the British Empire, but taught it. Imperialism pierced its way through the teaching of economics, geography, literature, and writing. The Empire was important for job prospects and dinner-table conversation alike, and the study of these examination papers shows the establishment pushing superiority and the Empire as a cultural treasure of Britain in its public schools
Comparison of Africa in the years 1880 and 1913 – after the ‘scramble for Africa’ by European colonisers. Image credit: WikiMedia.