ABSTRACT
Over recent years time and effort have been devoted to stress the moral essence and the astounding global consequences of the curricular revolution in the influential late-Victorian and Edwardian public school system of imperial Britain:
Athleticism, as this curricular revolution (and its corruptions) was termed, constituted an innovation creating shock waves that travelled the length and breadth of the British Empire, leaving in their wake transformed educational policies and practices. In short, the ideology comprised in pure form an idiosyncratic reconstruction of the curriculum with playing fields as a major (but not an exclusive) setting for moral rehabilitation and redirection. 2
The ideology proved to be a major force for educational and social change, and its significance has been inexcusably neglected in studies of the making of the imperial, and indeed, the global, curriculum and society.