History of Colonial Education: Key Reflections

Abstract

The history of education in India has long been a contentious but also particularly productive research field, not only for what it reveals about the philosophies and practice of education but also because the transmission of knowledge to the young has been continuously contested and is intimately connected to wider political structures, institutions, and ideologies. Traditionally the focus for historians has been on the role, relevance, and impact of Western knowledge on colonial educational policies and pedagogical practices and the ways in which colonial education was used to provide justification for colonialism as Britain's gift to the subcontinent, a narrative which has been consistently disputed by Indians themselves. However in the last 30 years, there has been a significant shift towards an engagement with the details of both education policy and practice, so that the reader is now impressed with the vibrancy of the field and the wide range of approaches taken. In short, colonialism is now viewed as only one of many

Post-Colonial Agenda for Engineering Education Research in India

“…The curriculum focused on English language proficiency and subjects relevant to colonial administration, such as law, administration, and engineering. The British administration showed little interest in promoting traditional Indian education systems and often viewed them as inferior (Ellis, 2020). Traditional educational institutions were marginalized and received little support from the colonial government.…”

The university in modern South Asia: Historiographical framings between the local and the global

“…Research on contemporary higher education issues, led by disciplines such as sociology and education studies, is predominantly concerned with the effects of recent developments (post‐1980) — such as neoliberal market reforms, privatization, and the rise of the knowledge economy 1 . From a longer perspective, the historiography of education in the post‐independence period has not undergone the same enriching developments as that of the colonial era (Allender, 2010; Bagchi, 2014; Ellis, 2020), continuing to be narrated primarily through the perspective of national educational policy (Sherman, 2018; Siddiqui, 2022). In both cases, the university is rarely demarcated as a unique category of study, folded instead into broader surveys of colonial/nationalist education systems (Sarangapani & Pappu, 2021) or into commemorative accounts of individual institutions.…”

“…period has not undergone the same enriching developments as that of the colonial era (Allender, 2010;Bagchi, 2014;Ellis, 2020), continuing to be narrated primarily through the perspective of national educational policy (Sherman, 2018;Siddiqui, 2022). In both cases, the university is rarely demarcated as a unique category of study, folded instead into broader surveys of colonial/nationalist education systems (Sarangapani & Pappu, 2021) or into commemorative accounts of individual institutions.…”