British Imperialism and its Legacies: Learning about the Empire and Commonwealth at School in the west of Scotland

Comments

Glasgow Museums has a collection of several hundred children’s school textbooks and teaching aids (e.g., maps, film strips) which can be used to explore the way in which children in the west of Scotland were taught about Empire, race and colonialism.

Most of the objects were donated to Glasgow Museums and date to the later 1800s and 1900s, with the majority dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. These dates cover the period from the height of the British Empire to the establishment of the Commonwealth and the independence of most overseas territories and colonies.

The majority of the items in the collections were probably aimed at children aged between 8 and 14, and cover history (e.g., Pioneers in India or Our Empire's Story Told in Pictures), geography (e.g., Essential Geography of the British Empire) and natural history (e.g., Birds of New Zealand). There are encyclopaedias and atlases. The collection contains teacher’s textbooks and other resources, such as maps, globes, posters, film strips with notes, object lesson cards, and so on.

We can also examine what was being taught through school timetables, lists of required books, and merit certificates which list the individual subjects for the child and their grades. So we know, for example, that 14 year olds in Glasgow in the 1920s were studying ‘The Empire’.

More research is required to examine the collection and understand what children were learning. The books and teaching aids reflect the values and attitudes of the times in which they were written, and present subjects such as Empire, colonialism, enslavement and attitudes to other peoples and cultures accordingly. Children were taught about the ‘great men’ of Empire (soldiers, merchants, etc.) and the ‘white man’s burden’. This is exemplified by one of the books chosen as a school prize, Heroes of Our Empire by G Barnett Smith and FM Holmes, awarded by the Glasgow School Board in 1909. There are a few items in the collection connected to Empire Day celebrations in schools, and evidence of pupils having emigrated abroad.

At the same time, due to migration into the city over the last 150 years, Glasgow schools have taught pupils from diverse backgrounds, principally from the Empire/Commonwealth countries. Closer study of the collection could help identify what we have relating to pupils from Jewish, South Asian, Caribbean, Chinese or other backgrounds.

Broader term

British Imperialism and its Legacies: Education and Colonialism