Ending empire: Education for ignorance, 1945-1960s
This chapter covers the period 1945-1960. It links the collapse of the British Empire as former colonies fought for or gained their independence peacefully, with the education systems emerging in post-war Britain. The migration of workers from former colonies to fill job vacancies set the racist terms for subsequent discussion of immigration and citizenship rights. The period covers the expansion of education from the 1940s and the incorporations of migrant’s children into a class-based education system. There was minimal information about the realities of decolonisation and why minorities had arrived in the country. This was a period of education for ignorance as any discussion of the brutalities of decolonisation was missing from public discourse, and the school and university curricula remained ethnocentric. By the end of the 1960s Enoch Powell MP was claiming that a sense of being a persecuted minority was growing in the working class.