Colonial Citizen as an Educational Ideal

Krishna Kumar The customary statement that colonial education was 'aimed' at producing clerks is both theoretically feeble and historically untenable. We need a more adequate model capable of accommodating the contradictions that were inherent in the vision of colonial education as well as those that became manifest in its consequences. This paper attempts to use the concept of an educational ideal to identify an organising principle in Indian colonial education in the nineteenth century WE owe the concept of an educational ideal as a means of historical inquiry to Mannheim. He defined it as "a residue of attitudes, principles and forms of behaviour" which shape educational aims and arrangements in a period of history.' The concept enabled him to debunk the notion