2024 Theses Doctoral

Democracy's children: education, citizenship and social change in Britain and the empire, c.1902-1955

Lees, Lynton Elizabeth

This dissertation is a political and intellectual history of educational thought in Britain and the British empire told through the Institute of Education in London. It explores how and why children’s education became central to the late British imperial project. It argues that contemporary ideas about the social and political aims of education were deeply shaped by a growing sense of democracy’s fragility and contingency in the early twentieth century, and by reformers’ view of the British empire as democracy’s guardian on the world stage.

It draws on the archives of staff, students and influential supporters of the Institute, tracing its institutional transformation from provincial Edwardian teacher-training college to an outward-looking imperial center for educational reform and research in Britain’s colonial empire and in the British Commonwealth. It argues that Britain’s leading educators tried to position themselves as experts in making citizens fit for democracy. It shows how these pedagogues pursued reforms to metropolitan and colonial education to project an outward image of the British empire as a progressive pedagogical project preparing members of political communities for self-government.