This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality.

This open access edited volume offers an analysis of the entangled histories of education and development in twentieth-century Africa. It deals with the plurality of actors that competed and collaborated to formulate educational and developmental paradigms and projects: debating their utility and purpose, pondering their necessity and risk, and evaluating their intended and unintended consequences in colonial and postcolonial moments. Since the late nineteenth century, the “educability” of the native was the subject of several debates and experiments: numerous voices, arguments, and agendas emerged, involving multiple institutions and experts, governmental and non-governmental, religious and laic, operating from the corridors of international organizations to the towns and rural villages of Africa. This plurality of expressions of political, social, cultural, and economic imagination of education and development is at the core of this collective work.

Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.

This book is long overdue, especially in the fields of education, in general, and comparative education, in particular, anywhere in the world, where educational issues are reflected on, researched or written about. Unlike many current books on education having narrow perspectives, Sir Michael Sadler's approach to his contributions on educational issues and questions is eminently wide-angled. It also does justice to his dictum that as education is as broad as life, to call oneself an educational expert is to equate oneself with being an 'Expert on Life'! Sadler's thoughts and analyses are bafflingly of relevance for us today as educational policymakers or educational administrators, educators, politicians and statesmen. Besides the book's being a mine of thought-provoking information for academics, it is also an indispensable source of information for graduates, post-graduates, workers in national and international bodies (UNESCO) dealing with educational planning and assistance. This unprecedented publication underlines Sadler's unique educational scholarship both in content and style, expressed through an inimitable and felicitous English usage.

Providing an introduction, this work contains sections on the British Empire.