ABSTRACT
Most accounts of the history of schooling in the Cape Colony give primacy to the activities of the Education Department. Its formal structure and the official format of its annual reports to the Cape Parliament invites a view of it as a recognisably modernist institution, managing the systematic expansion of schooling from Cape Town. Shifting the vantage point from Cape Town to the Karoo itself, and more specifically to the different groups of people living around the springs of Schietfontein and Harmsfontein in the mid-1800s, the activities of the Education Department recede in significance. In short, in looking at the development of schooling in the rural northern Cape Colony at this time, it is important to look past general histories of education to find a more complex and uneven mosaic of arrangements relating to childhood, work, and schooling.
