ABSTRACT
One of the key processes involved in educational change concerns the question: what is worth teaching? English administrators of the mid-nineteenth century answered it in terms of their perception of what Indian society lacked. They saw it as their job to change the indigenous system of education into one that would match the aims of the empire. We have already distinguished between the aims of the empire and its practical needs. It is not difficult to identify the practical needs — subordinate officers and clerks, for example — and to note the components of school and college curriculum which matched these needs. This aspect of the history of colonial education has been thoroughly covered by earlier research. But useful though this coverage is, it need not have led to the confusion one finds so widespread in Indian educational discourse between the needs of the empire and its aims. This confusion is at the base of the popular belief that the aim of colonial education was to produce clerks. If one shares this belief, one would see no need to probe mid-nineteenth-century colonial perceptions of ‘what is worth teaching’.
