In Search of ‘One Good Public School’: The Cape Colonial Education Project, 1865–1873

Abstract

This article examines the colonial education project at the Cape of Good Hope during a time of transition, 1865–72. Whereas the first half of the 19th century had found the British colonial state prioritising a liberal programme of free, non-racial education, the discourses shifted in the second half of the century. The goal became gaining wider local support for state-aided schooling while reducing the costs of education through partnerships with ‘inhabitants’ or religious organisations. The project was the education, at varying levels, of the colonial youth. Identifying denominational competition as an impediment to progress in building effective partnerships, it was official policy to fund only ‘secular’ education. The focus of this article is on the transition to aided public schooling through Undenominational Public Schools (UPS) in four Cape villages. It follows the interventions of the head of Cape education in achieving ‘one good public school’ with colonists whom he categorised as ‘able and willing to act for themselves’. It asks what the resulting messy processes and small struggles over schooling reveal about the meaning of public education in the Cape Colony in the 1860s and 1870s. It concludes that denominational identity was strong and ‘secularity’ problematic. For some, however, the prospects of social advancement gained through a UPS outweighed the costs of modifying a public Dutch and Dutch Reformed identity at school. For others, in a still fragile education system, local rejection of the UPS teacher could result in no schooling or temporary participation in the local mission school set up ‘for education of the poor’.