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Chapter three, ‘Rules and Rule Breaking in Teacher Training Colleges’, taps into the rich and virtually unused archives of seven training colleges in England and Scotland to show how tremendously liberating these institutions could be in practice despite their oppressive rules and infinitesimally detailed timetables. For instance, teachers-in-training reacted to bans on romantic relationships by creating a cult of the romantic. They celebrated courtship and more casual flirtation in poems, paintings, and short stories of their real-world exploits, all of which they circulated widely in ‘friendship albums’ and college ‘literary magazines’. This defiance became the basis of lifelong friendships—and a professional culture that pushed back against the imposition of policies.

Atiya Fyzee’s travelogue provides a glimpse not only of grand public gatherings and prestigious social engagements, but also of the so-called everyday: a world that is routine and even mundane. A form of informal ethnography, Atiya’s travelogue contains accounts of food and cooking in Britain during the Edwardian period, along with gardening, the weather, religion, leisure, and travel. Atiya also wrote about the day-to-day realities of friendships, college life, and what it meant in practical terms to study at a women’s teacher training college of the period. She was particularly impressed by the English servants when compared to those back in her native India.

Atiya Fyzee arrived in London in September 1906, when politics in Britain was undergoing major changes. London at the time was still a great imperial city, the nexus of the British Empire’s political authority, financial power, and commercial dominance. Atiya met many different individuals over the course of her stay, including former colonial officers and British gentry, famous Muslim reformers, and nationalist leaders. Based on Atiya’s account of her encounters with local elites and prominent Indians in London, this chapter discusses empire, Britain’s thriving social scene, and diasporic communities in Edwardian Britain. It notes the comparative frequency of mixed marriages between Indians and Britons and Atiya’s time spent with fellow students and staff at the Maria Grey Training College.

Despite antebellum foci on scientific and engineering curricula, the Virginia Military Institute’s military component provided Virginia and the Confederacy with several military advantages during the Civil War. These benefits included the drilling of raw troops before the First Battle of Manassas, the Corps of Cadets serving as a unit in the Confederate Army, and the provision of numerous Southern military officers throughout the war. Remaining open during the conflict was challenging for the institute. Obtaining both military and academic supplies was increasing difficult as the war continued. The Corps of Cadets was used numerous times as reserve troops, and carried out duties such as burial parties, apprehending deserters, and eventually as combat troops as the South’s sources of manpower withered. The Corps of Cadets, 247 strong, participated as a unit in the Battle of New Market, Virginia, on May 15, 1864, temporarily stopping Union Army advancement into the Shenandoah Valley.

This chapter examines educational history in colonial Algeria, the context from which most of the writers and texts at the centre of the book emerged. It raises general questions about the role played in colonialism and its purported ‘civilizing mission’ by colonial education, which was characterized by a remarkable diversity of perspectives, policies and institutions. Examples include the prestigious Lycée Bugeaud and the teacher training college in Bouzaréah‎, which were attended by several major writers; and médersas (/madrasas) where Islam and Arabic were studied, which were also attended by some eminent francophone writers, and funded by the French authorities well into an era when all state-funded education was supposed to be secular. Debates included those around adaptation and assimilation associated with the mythical phrase ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’. Overall the chapter shows that the place of education in colonialism is misunderstood if one assumes that colonial education worked simply and consistently as a tool of colonialism – even if that was a significant part of the story. [166]