Colonial Education Quotes

It is notable that almost all the Founding Fathers were first generation, college graduates.

We have a problem in Africa with our education system. It is a relic from the past. The education system was meant to create clerks to help the administrative role of the colonial power. So the emphasis was on neat handwriting and how to write good reports and things like that, and if you move further, then you study Shakespeare and Molière. But we don’t have enough engineers and scientists. Two percent of African university graduates study agriculture, when 70 percent of our people are living off the land. Obviously, we have a problem.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

[Discussing the American colonies] In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science ...

In a country which two hundred years ago was peopled only by savages and whose government has ... been no other than republican, it is really wonderful that there should be any polite authors at all in any line ...

The truth is that our system of public instruction, which has awakened the Hindus from the sleep of centuries and quickened their inert masses with some of the noble impulses of a nation is opposed to the tradition, unsuited to the requirements, and hateful to the religion of the Musalmans [Moslems]

The Virginian Society for the Promotion of Usefull Knowledge

The truth is, I love history and studied it in college, with a particular focus on early American history. My love is so deep, in fact, I went to school at The College of William & Mary in Colonial Williamsburg.

Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.

It is a matter of public shame that while we have now commemorated our hundredth anniversary, not one in every ten children attending Public schools throughout the colonies is acquainted with a single historical fact about Australia.

There were Indians at Harvard College in the 1600s.