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Classical Education and Britain’s Imperial Elite

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Britain’s Imperial Muse

Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

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Abstract

A.P. Thornton once described Kennedy’s Latin Primer, a standard public school text for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as ‘one of the winding sheets of empire’. This was hyperbole, meant to underscore his assertion that Britain’s elite educational institutions had lost their vitality by the 1920s and 1930s, and were no longer instilling the proper imperial spirit in graduates. By implication these same institutions — and the classical curriculum symbolized by Kennedy’s Primer — had been very successful at instilling that spirit during the empire’s 19th-century heyday. Elsewhere Thornton was even more explicit. He referred to elite education in Britain’s public schools and universities as an ‘elixir of empire’: a powerful cultural force inculcating particular imperial ideas and values in Britain’s elites, albeit in a sometimes mysterious, often uneven, and entirely unscientific manner.62

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Notes to Text

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    C. A. Hagerman (Assistant Professor of History)

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Hagerman, C.A. (2013). Classical Education and Britain’s Imperial Elite. In: Britain’s Imperial Muse. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316424_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316424_2

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