ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we begin by examining Britain’s historical legacy of ‘race’,1 class, gender and Empire, and look at the way this was represented in the school curriculum of the early twentieth century. We argue that the attitudes and images projected by school texts at this time and reinforced in government statements and policies served in part to racialize2 the children of colonial and post-colonial immigrants as ‘a problem’, after mass immigration in the post World War 2 period. We then look at the educational experiences of Asian and black pupils/students,3
before looking at some ways which were adopted to address ‘the problems’, which we argue lay in the education system itself and not in the pupils/students. We conclude with some suggestions as to how we might proceed in the new millennium.
